Regional Occupational Employment Projections : Modeling Supply Constraints in the Direct-Requirements Approach

Detailed industry-occupation employment forecasts are an important class of regional labor market information produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In theory, the forecasts should improve the national, interregional, and intertemporal matching efficiency of labor markets. But the efficiency argument is dependent on the quality of the forecasts. The methodology used to produce the projections is still fundamentally a demand-requirements approach that implicitly assumes that labor supply is infinitely elastic for every occupation. This paper examines the validity of that assumption and evaluates a demographically based labor supply module as an adjunct to the current methodology