Labour force participation among men has been falling for more than half a century in the US, leading many employers to complain that ‘nobody wants to work anymore’. In 1970, roughly 95% of American men aged 25 to 54 were either working or looking for work. Today, that figure is closer to 88%. This downward trend has persisted across recessions, recoveries, and periods of strong economic growth (Figure 1a).

Figure 1 Male labour force participation and male lifetime labour market experiences in the US

Notes: Panel (a) shows the labour force participation rate for prime-aged men (ages 25–54) by year, 1986–2019, from the Current Population Survey ASEC. Panel (b) shows aggregate male lifetime labour market experiences over time, net of current conditions. We construct this measure by computing, for each cohort, the mean national male wage and male employment rate from birth until three years before the observation year; multiplying the two; averaging across cohorts in each observation year; and residualising on the contemporaneous national male wage and male employment rate.

A large literature in economics has tried to explain this long-run decline in male labour force participation. Researchers have pointed to a wide range of factors, including technological change, globalisation, disability insurance, incarceration, opioid use, changing leisure opportunities, and rising female employment. For example, Rao et. al. (2016) highlight the role of declining labour market opportunities and weak wage growth among less-skilled men. Yet, even comprehensive reviews of this literature, such as those by Binder and Bound (2019) and Abraham and Kearney (2020) conclude that these factors explain only part of the decline. Similarly, Stock et al. (2014) find that this decline has a large unexplained portion.

Economists often distinguish between demand-side explanations for the decline, which emphasise the availability of jobs, and supply-side explanations, which emphasise workers’ willingness to work. Our work in Levin and Vidart (2026a) suggests a bridge between these explanations. When men spend years observing weak wages and employment for the men around them (Figure 1b), they become less optimistic about the returns to work, and as a consequence decide that entering the labour market is just not worth it. In this way, comparatively short-run demand-side shocks can spill over to long-run reductions in labour supply, by changing men’s persistent beliefs about whether participation will pay off. These beliefs can affect men’s decisions even when contemporaneous conditions materially improve around them.

This idea builds on a growing literature in economics showing that personal economic experiences shape beliefs and behaviour. Individuals who live through stock market booms become more willing to invest in equities (Malmendier and Nagel 2011), lifetime macroeconomic growth shapes the willingness to take risks (Levin and Vidart 2026b), inflation experiences affect inflation expectations (Malmendier et al. 2021), and exposure to adverse economic conditions can leave persistent scars on consumption behaviour (Malmendier and Shen 2021). Our findings indicate that labour market experiences similarly influence decisions about whether to participate in the workforce, particularly for men. They also identify one possible factor behind the ‘boy crisis’, or the multi-front decline in the prospects of American men (Farrell and Gray 2018).

Cohorts carry different labour market memories

Two facts motivate this perspective. First, much of the decline in male participation reflects differences across generations, rather than changes within generations. Younger cohorts participate less than older cohorts did at the same ages (Figure 2a). Second, measures of lifetime labour market experience for these cohorts, net of contemporaneous conditions, follow a similar pattern (Figure 2b). This suggests that men who grew up in time periods when other men were struggling in the labour market are less likely to participate in it, and highlights how early experiences may affect their willingness to work later in life, perhaps by shaping how rewarding they perceive work to be.

Figure 2 Male labour force participation and lifetime labour market experiences across cohorts

Notes: These figures plot the cohort decomposition of the same objects as in Figure 1.

To formally test this experience channel, we combine data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with state-level measures of male wages and employment rates from the Current Population Survey. For each man in the sample, we construct measures of the labour market conditions experienced by other men in his birth state, from childhood through adulthood. Because wages and employment rates differ substantially across states and over time, men born in different places and years were exposed to dramatically different labour market histories by the time they reached prime working age.

Importantly, we compare individuals while controlling for current labour market conditions, individual characteristics that don’t change over time, and any factors that vary nationally or within state over time. This allows us to isolate whether accumulated experiences matter above and beyond the labour market a person currently faces, and net of any stable differences across individuals in preferences, skills, or background.

Men who experienced stronger past male labour markets are more likely to work

The results are striking: a one-standard-deviation increase in lifetime exposure to higher male wages in a man’s state of birth increases his probability of labour force participation by roughly six percentage points. A comparable increase in lifetime exposure to stronger male employment rates raises participation by about two percentage points. Combining the two into a single measure of expected labour market opportunities produces an effect of about seven percentage points.

These are economically meaningful effects. They imply that men who have spent their lives observing stronger labour market outcomes are substantially more likely to remain attached to the labour force. The findings are robust across a wide range of alternative specifications and controls. They also appear when using employment rather than labour force participation as the outcome.

Labour market beliefs are formed early in life, and travel with people

A natural concern is that these results reflect the labour market opportunities men face today, or their own employment histories, rather than a lasting effect of the experiences of men around them. We address this concern in two ways, both aimed at separating direct exposure to work from the broader labour market environment men observed while growing up.

First, we use cross-state migration during childhood as a natural experiment. Moves at young ages are largely determined by parents, rather than by the child’s own labour market prospects, making them useful for separating early environments from later work opportunities. If our estimates merely reflected current local opportunities, we would expect the influence of the original environment to fade once a child leaves it. Instead, we find that early labour market experiences continue to matter even among men who left their birth state before adulthood. The effect remains visible among individuals who moved before age ten and therefore had little or no direct exposure to that state’s labour market as workers.

Figure 3 Leave-one-age-block-out estimates

Notes: Each point reports the effect of lifetime male wages (panel a) or the lifetime male employment rate (panel b) on male labour force participation, when excluding a single five-year age block of experiences. The sample is native-born men aged 25–54 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1986–2019.

Second, we show that the effects are strongest for experiences accumulated during childhood and adolescence, before most individuals have entered the labour market. When we remove these formative years from the experience measures for male wages (Figure 3a) and male employment (Figure 3b), the effects become much smaller.

The results also remain present across groups defined by own and father’s educational attainment, making it less likely that the experience measures simply proxy for differences in human capital or childhood socioeconomic status.

The role of identity

We also find evidence that people pay particular attention to the experiences of those they view as similar to themselves, and not just with respect to gender. When we separately construct labour market experiences for white men and Black men, labour force participation responds more strongly to the experiences of one’s own racial group. White men’s participation is more strongly associated with the labour market history of white men, while Black men’s participation is more strongly associated with the labour market history of Black men.

Direct evidence on changes in beliefs

If beliefs are the mechanism for what we see in the participation data, lifetime experiences should influence expectations about future labour market opportunities when beliefs are measured directly. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations, we find exactly that. Men who experienced stronger labour markets are more optimistic about future wages and more optimistic about their chances of employment. Notably, the same experiences do not significantly affect broader macroeconomic expectations, such as those regarding inflation or national unemployment. The effects appear specific to beliefs about personal labour market prospects rather than general economic optimism.

A role for labour market expectation management in macroeconomic policy

Our results suggest that when a region experiences a prolonged decline in male wages or employment, the consequences may not end when labour demand recovers. Men exposed to those conditions may revise their beliefs about the value of work, and those beliefs can persist for years or even decades.

This finding has implications for macroeconomic policy. Central banks have long understood that inflation expectations matter, and that policy can help anchor those expectations. But the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: to keep prices stable and to maintain employment rates. Our results suggest that expectations may also need anchoring in the second domain. If weak labour markets teach workers that participation is unlikely to pay off, then temporary downturns can generate persistent declines in labour supply, even after wages and employment begin to recover. The Fed or other government agencies may be able to help labour markets recover faster from downturns by actively working to manage expectations around a labour market recovery.

The news these days is often full of doom and gloom about the future of work. Governments should consider counterbalancing these headlines with earned optimism about the future – it may just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

References

Abraham, K G, and M S Kearney (2020), “Explaining the decline in the US employment-to-population ratio: A review of the evidence”, Journal of Economic Literature 58(3): 585–643.

Binder, A J, and J Bound (2019), “The declining labor market prospects of less-educated men”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(2): 163–190.

Farrell, W, and J Gray (2018), The boy crisis: Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it, BenBella Books.

Levin, R, and D Vidart (2026a), “‘Nobody wants to work anymore’: Lifetime labor market experiences and the decline of male labor force participation in the US”, NBER Working Paper.

Levin, R, and D Vidart (2026b), “Risk-taking adaptation to macroeconomic experiences”, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics (forthcoming).

Malmendier, U, and S Nagel (2011), “Depression babies: Do macroeconomic experiences affect risk taking?”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(1): 373–416.

Malmendier, U, S Nagel, and Y Zhen (2021), “The making of hawks and doves”, Journal of Monetary Economics 117: 19–42.

Malmendier, U, and S Shen (2021), “Scarred consumption”, VoxEU.org, 15 March.

Rao, B, J Furman, and S Black (2016), “The long-term decline in us prime-age male labour force participation”, VoxEU.org, 6 July.

Stock, J, B Stevenson, J Coglianese, J Furman, and S Braun (2014), “Understanding the decline in the labour force participation rate in the US”, VoxEU.org, 18 August.