Lonnie Golden and Tesfayi Gebreselassie also look at a less-studied aspect of labor economics—"over-employment mismatches" in which employees work more hours than they would desire if they could choose hours and income without constraints. While acknowledging that underemployment mismatches may be more common, Golden and Gebreselassie find that at least 7 percent of the employed would prefer to trade some income for fewer hours.

Jesse X. Fan, Barbara B. Brown, Lori Kowaleski-Jones, Ken R. Smith, and Cathleen D. Zick use cluster analysis to group Consumer Expenditure Survey respondents into eight food-budget clusters ranging from "balanced" to "meat-eater" to nonalcoholic "beverage-dominated." They then tabulate the basic demographic characteristics of these clusters.

A 1.5-percent drop in spending on food at home in 2005 was offset by an 8.2-percent increase in spending on food away from home, resulting in a 2.6-percent increase in total food expenditures. The drop in food at home expenditures in 2005 was driven by a significant decrease (13.1 percent) in spending on meats, poultry, fish and eggs. Expenditures for two components of food at home increased in 2005: Dairy products were up 2.0 percent and other food at home increased by a significant 7.7 percent.

Consumer expenditures on apparel and services (such as laundry and dry cleaning) were $1,886 in 2005, not much different than they had been in the previous year. A decline in spending on footwear partially offset increases in other parts of the category.

In 2005, the proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over that worked at some point during the year was 67.7 percent, essentially unchanged from 2004. Among those with work experience during 2005, 77.4 percent were employed year round (either full or part time), up by 0.4 percentage point from 2004.

Continuing a long-term growth trend, full-year employment among women edged up to 74.0 percent in 2005. The percentage of men employed year round also was up over the year, increasing to 80.5 percent from 80.0 percent in 2004.

In 2006, Hawaii again reported the lowest unemployment rate among the States, 2.4 percent. Utah had the next lowest rate, 2.9 percent, followed by Nebraska and Virginia at 3.0 percent each. Twelve additional States registered annual average unemployment rates below 4.0 percent.

The States with the highest unemployment rates in 2006 were Michigan at 6.9 percent, Mississippi at 6.8 percent, Alaska at 6.7 percent, and South Carolina at 6.5 percent. The District of Columbia reported a rate of 6.0 percent.