Economic Quarterly

We conduct an accounting exercise of the changes in aggregate employment, unemployment, and out of labor force (OLF) among 25–64-year-old men from 1968–2010. We decompose the observed changes in these labor market outcomes into changes in the sociodemographic composition of the population and changes in the labor market outcomes of different sociodemographic groups. Using the results of the decomposition, we predict that the OLF-to-population ratio for men will increase to 16 percent in 2015, up from 14.7 percent in 2010.