During the typical recovery from U.S. post-War period economic downturns, employment recovers to its pre-recession level within months of the output trough. However, during the last two recoveries, employment has taken up to two years to achieve its pre-recession benchmark. We propose a formal...

We consider whether disaggregated data enhances the efficiency of aggregate employment forecasts. We find that incorporating spatial interaction into a disaggregated forecasting model lowers the out-of-sample mean-squared-error from a univariate aggregate model by 70 percent at a two-year horizon