Plot the average weekly hours of production and nonsupervisory employees (total private).

(a) What do you notice about how this time series behaves around recession dates (the shaded areas)?

(b) In our model, the representative consumer supplies labor time in the market, and this quantity of labor supplied captures total employment in the economy. But in practice, total hours worked by all workers is affected by how much each person works, and by how many people are working. Comment on what you observe in the time series, and how this relates to our model and how we want to interpret it.

Answer this question using the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED database, accessible at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/