The proportion of U.S. adults in paid work has declined in recent decades. While the fall in male employment gets the most attention, female work rates are declining too. A new NBER paper from Katharine Abraham and Melissa Kearney provides a comprehensive review and rigorous analysis of the overall trends, and potential contributory factors including trade, technology, weak demand, and an aging population to name a few.

Abraham and Kearney suggest that other factors are likely playing a role, too, which are impossible to quantify. These include changes in the social norms around paid work and "improvements in leisure technology" (read: Rainbow Six Siege and other awesome games). Note that their preferred measure of labor market activity is the employment-to-population ratio (see Eleanor Krause and Isabel Sawhill's guide for a quick explanation of the different employment metrics).

The Abraham and Kearney paper is a gold mine, and an important contribution to a vital debate. But one sentence in particular jumped out to us: "The decline for men age 25 to 34 (5.6 percentage points) was more than twice as large as the decline for women the same age (2.3 percentage points); among those age 35 to 44 and those age 45 to 54, the declines for men and women were more similar."

For all the worries about middle-aged men, it is actually men at the younger end of the prime-age years who have seen the sharpest drop in employment rates.

Read the full article about young men in the labor market by Richard V. Reeves and Eleanor Krause at Brookings.