Estimating the trend in employment growth by Daniel Aaronson, vice president and director of microeconomic research, and Scott Brave, senior business economist, July 2013: “For the unemployment rate to decline, the U.S. economy needs to generate above-trend job growth. We currently estimate trend employment growth to be around 80,000 jobs per month, and we expect it to decline over the remainder of the decade, due largely to changing labor force demographics and slower population growth.”