Over at the NYT Economix blog. Despite the claims of critics, there’s little evidence that employers are creating more part-time jobs in order to avoid the ACA employer mandate (which is now a year off, btw).
A post by Dean Baker led me to wonder what a scatterplot of the share of involuntary part-timers (IPT) against unemployment rates by state would look like. One would expect a positive correlation, suggesting that it’s weak labor demand, not Obamacare, that’s driving the IPT share. And, in fact, that’s what the data show.
The figure in the NYT piece plots the unemployment rates against the IPT shares through the first half of this year. But I suspect some of you savvy OTE’ers are asking: OK, but what do you get if you do the same exercise in changes, netting out level differences between states, say between 2010fh and 2013fh? Well, here you go:
Change in IPT Share and Unemp Rates, by State, 2010fh-2013fh
Source: EPI’s analysis of CPS data.
Pretty much the same story. Here’s a little regression table for your further entertainment, showing the coefficient on the unemployment rate (or change in the rate).
| Coef | t-stat | |
| Levels, 2013FH | 0.46 | 5.59 |
| Changes, 2010fh-13fh | 0.47 | 4.51 |
Much thanks to EPI’s David Cooper for providing the data.
