What’s new in the SF Fed Data Explorer? The Beveridge Curve: Job Openings vs. Unemployment

What’s new in the SF Fed Data Explorer? The Beveridge Curve: Job Openings vs. Unemployment You may have heard that the labor market is tight. When jobs are plentiful, people can generally find work quickly, which makes unemployment numbers drop. We can see this dynamic by charting job openings each month against unemployment in that same month. A consistent curved pattern emerges in which unemployment moves in the opposite direction of job openings. In fact, historical data show that this pattern, known as the Beveridge curve, has been repeating for over 100 years. However, the disruptions to society and the economy brought on by the pandemic threw us off this smooth curve. As the economy reopened, 2021 saw the labor market tighten rapidly. The rate of job openings reached levels rarely seen before as the data returned to the high part of the smooth Beveridge curve in early 2022. One key implication is that, as the economy begins to slow, the number of job openings can drop quite a bit without any noticeable increase in unemployment. We are already seeing some of this in the data. You can keep track of the evolution of job openings and unemployment by exploring the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, tab in the SF Fed Data Explorer. Copy-and-paste Chart Code 4b1200147800000000000000000020 to recreate this chart and download the data used in this video. Read more about this topic in “Reducing Inflation along a Nonlinear Phillips Curve” () by Erin E. Crust, Kevin J. Lansing, and Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, FRBSF Economic Letter 2023-17. ** The San Francisco Fed is one of the 12 Reserve Banks in the Federal Reserve System. San Francisco is the headquarters of the Twelfth Federal Reserve District, which includes the nine western states—Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington—plus American Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. As part of the nation’s central bank, we inform monetary policy, regulate banks, administer certain consumer protection laws, and act as a financial partner to the U.S. government. We listen, learn, and reflect the communities we serve so we can make better decisions and policy to help our nation thrive. Learn more about San Francisco Fed at Sign up for the SF Fed Newsletter to get up-to-date information on news, research, careers and more. Views do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or the Federal Reserve System.