The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a unified reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate the unemployment rate and the labor-force participation rate by about two percentage points on average and that the bias in the latter has increased over time. The BLS estimate of the average duration of unemployment substantially overstates the true duration of uninterrupted spells of unemployment and misrepresents what happened to average durations during the Great Recession and its recovery.

计算美国失业率、劳动力参与率和失业持续时间的基础数据包含许多内部矛盾。本文对这些不一致进行了分类，并提出了统一的和解方案。我们发现，通常的统计数据平均低估了失业率和劳动力参与率约两个百分点，并且后者的偏差随着时间的推移而增加。BLS 对平均失业持续时间的估计大大夸大了不间断失业的真实持续时间，并歪曲了大衰退及其复苏期间平均持续时间的情况。