Just looking at the economy's overall size, you wouldn't think that the last year was much different from any of the others since the recession. The U.S. economy grew at about the same rate in 2014 as it did in the previous four years -- less than 2.4 percent, according to the Federal Reserve's most recent projection. Yet last year was different. People started going back to work. The percentage of Americans working, more or less stuck in a ditch since 2009, increased from 58.6 percent in December 2013 to 59.2 percent last month. Employers added an average of 246,000 positions a month, about 3 million jobs overall. Economists will debate what happened, but one of the more controversial theories is that Congress's decision not to extend federal unemployment benefits at the end of 2013 encouraged those out of work to settle for more poorly paid jobs, giving firms a better reason to expand and hire new workers. That's the conclusion of a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors, Marcus Hagedorn of the University of Oslo, Iourii Manovskii of the University of Pennsylvania and Stockholm University's Kurt Mitman concluded that the reduction in benefits created 1.8 million jobs last year -- more than half of the total. Their work has already drawn several rebuttals from other economists criticizing their choice of methods and data.
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