Orazem: Older workers unemployed twice as long as young ones

Peter Orazem, University Professor, was interviewed for the Oct. 16 radio program Marketplace on the effect of COVID-19 on unemployment.

"Younger workers haven't had as much time to focus on a specialty," says labor economist Peter Orazem at Iowa State University. "As a result, the skills they have tend to be more general and more applicable to lots of firms."

After the great recession in 2008, Orazem says older workers were unemployed about twice as long as younger workers. "So what you've found was that the younger people were much more flexible in terms of switching to a different type of job."