Teaching the Washington Post and Goldman Sachs About Employment in the Construction Industry

The Washington Post has a piece puzzling over the fact that:

"Builders started work on 27.7 percent more homes in February than they did a year earlier. Yet the number of construction jobs in the United States was only 2.9 percent higher, year-over-year."

The Post turned to analysts at Goldman Sachs, who concluded that the answer was labor hoarding. They make a case that firms are changing the length of the workweek to meet the increased demand for labor rather than adding more workers. This...