Por EMESE BARTHA

FRANCFORT— Alemania pagó el miércoles el rendimiento más bajo en una subasta de bonos a 30 años desde la creación del euro.

El Bundesbank, que lleva a cabo las subastas de deuda alemana, vendió 2.458 millones de euros (US$3.200 millones) a un rendimiento promedio de 2,62%, un descenso frente a los 2,82% de la subasta anterior, llevada a cabo el 12 de octubre. La agencia de financiamiento alemana recibió 5.042 millones de euros en ofertas sobre su colocación de 3.000 millones de euros, cubriendo con creces las necesidades de la subasta.

Mientras tanto, el costo de asegurar la deuda portuguesa subieron a nuevos récords a medida que el rendimiento de su bono a 10 años tocó niveles que no se veían desde julio de 2011 debido a las preocupaciones por los efectos de las negociaciones de reestructuración de deuda griega. Los seguros contra la cesación de pagos (CDS) a cinco años, se cotizaban cerca a los niveles en los que se encontraban los mismo valores griegos en abril del año pasado.

Los CDS a cinco años de Portugal avanzaron 31 puntos base a 1.310 puntos base, lo que significa que ahora cuesta un promedio de US$1,31 millones el asegurar US$10 millones de deuda emitida por el país.

Los costos de financiación del país también subieron, con el rendimiento del bono a 10 años alcanzando 14,05%, subiendo 37 puntos base por encima de su cierre del martes, según cifras de Tradeweb. No obstante, los niveles de los bonos de Portugal deben tomarse con cierta cautela, ya que hay muy poca actividad de compra y venta de la deuda del país y las oscilaciones de precios son volátiles.

La demanda en la subasta alemana fue seguida de cerca después que dos de las cuatro subastas a 30 años de bonos atrajeran menos ofertas de lo esperado. Alemania ofreció 2.000 millones de euros en cada una de las cuatro subastas de bunds a 30 años.

“Aunque un rendimiento de 2,6% parece bajo en términos absolutos, aún está más de 60 puntos base por encima de lo que está disponible en bonos a 10 años y la corrección que se ha visto recientemente al menos ha incrementado los rendimientos hasta cierto punto”, dijo Jan von Gerich, analista jefe de Nordea.

“Por otra parte, los bonos alemanes no se ven tan costosos en el rango de 30 años”, agregó.

Los bunds se recuperaron después de la subasta, con los contratos a marzo marcando un nuevo cenit de sesión de 137,78, 0,48 puntos al alza frente al precio de apertura y 0,20 al alza después que se conocieran los resultados de la subasta.

Los bonos de larga maduración usualmente son comprados por inversionistas institucionales, especialmente compradores a largo plazo como los fondos de pensiones y las firmas de seguros, quienes necesitan flujos de efectivo para ajustarse a sus pasivos a largo plazo.

Los resultados de la subasta fueron “impresionantes” dijo un portavoz de la agencia financiera alemana. “Los inversionistas buscan y confían en la calidad del emisor de referencia de la euro zona”, dijo, agregando que la subasta ha confirmado esta tendencia para las emisiones de larga maduración.

Los bunds a 30 años tocaron un rendimiento históricamente bajo de cerca de 2,33% en el mercado secundario la semana pasada, pero se han recuperado desde entonces.

Mientras tanto, la Agencia Nacional de Gestión del Tesoro de Irlanda dijo el miércoles que ofrecerá a los tenedores de su bonos de enero de 2014 la posibilidad de canjearla por deuda de febrero de 2015, mostrando confianza de la habilidad del gobierno para pagar sus deudas después que el programa de rescate termine en 2013.

By MIA LAMAR And DAWN WOTAPKA

D.R. Horton Inc. swung to the black in its fiscal first quarter on a double-digit jump in home-building revenue and signaled cautious optimism for the spring selling season.

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Chairman Donald R. Horton said the home builder is off to a strong start this year, good news for a troubled sector that saw 2011′s sales fall to the lowest level since record keeping began in 1963.

As a builder largely catering to first-time buyers, D.R. Horton has faced difficulties in recent quarters as would-be customers encounter trouble with tighter lending requirements. The Fort Worth, Texas, company runs a program to help potential buyers improve their credit worthiness and it has also increased its focus on move-up buyers.

Another factor in its profitability is operations in smaller areas that skirted the worst of the housing crisis including Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Oklahoma City, Okla., markets the National Association of Home Builders have labeled “improving.”

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, D.R. Horton reported a profit of $27.7 million, or nine cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $20.4 million, or six cents a share, a year earlier.

Home-building revenue jumped 15% to $885.6 million.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings of four cents a share on revenue of $897 million.

Both closings and orders rose 13% from a year earlier, and backlog was up 18% at 4,530 homes as of Dec. 31.

The company’s cancellation rate, defined as canceled sales orders divided by gross sales orders, was 26%, down slightly from a year earlier.

Adjusted gross margins came in at 16.8%, up 1.2 percentage points year-over-year.

“D.R. Horton is in one of the best fundamental positions in the industry as it looks to report its third consecutive year of profitability in 2012,” Vincent Foley, an analyst with Barclays Capital, wrote in a client note.

By J.S. MARCUS

© Leif Gabrielsen

Liv Ullmann plays Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted matriarch of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey into Night.”

Liv Ullmann is known for her groundbreaking roles in Swedish movies, but she got her start on the Norwegian stage. Born in Tokyo in 1938 to Norwegian parents, she grew up in postwar Trondheim, and by her 20s had become one of Norway’s best-known actresses. In the 1960s she began her celebrated collaboration with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). She acted in 10 of his films, starting in 1966 with “Persona,” co-starring her friend, Swedish actress Bibi Andersson; and ending in 2003 with “Saraband,” in which she appeared alongside Bergman regular, Erland Josephson.

“Saraband,” a made-for-television project, was an exception for Ms. Ullmann. Although one of the world’s most admired actresses, she has all but given up acting, turning her talents instead toward directing. Like Bergman, whose scripts she has filmed, she directs both movies and plays, and her second career reached a high point in 2009, when her Sydney Theater Company production of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois, took New York audiences and critics by storm.

Photo: Kjerand Nesvik

Liv Ullmann acted in 10 of Ingmar Bergman’s films.

This month, Ms. Ullmann, who spends much of her time in the U.S., returns to acting, and to Norway, with a vengeance. Appearing on stage for the first time in 20 years, she has come home to try her hand at one of modern theater’s great dramatic roles—Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted matriarch of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” A dark, riveting, heartfelt portrait of a doomed theater clan, the play, set in early 20th century New England, is based on O’Neill’s own family. Though finished in the early 1940s, it was not published or staged until after the playwright’s death in 1953.

The new production—mounted by Norway’s traveling repertory company, the Riksteatret, and staged by Norwegian actor and director Stein Winge —will tour some 50 venues across Norway this fall. Fittingly, the run will end in December at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater, Ingmar Bergman’s professional home, where the play had its world premier in 1956.

Ms. Ullmann spoke to The Wall Street Journal by telephone from Oslo, a few days after the production’s Sept. 1 opening.

Why did you return to acting?

It was so tempting to come back to Norway—to be on the bus and tour the country, which I did in the beginning of my career. I could never forget the beauty of Norway, and it was tempting to be able to see Norway that way again, and then to know in the evening I am going to do my thing.

What is it like to appear in front of an audience after all these years?

Scary. My part, Mary Tyrone, is on morphine. In the beginning, her family doesn’t know, but very soon, they know and the audience knows. Then I go into a narcotic way of being. It’s a wonder how O’Neill has shown her — the truth comes out of her. Things you don’t normally want to say to people, she says. I was nervous to go so far into this most secret place of a human being, and in front of the audience, which I haven’t done for so long.

Mary is clearly a victim — of her doctors, of the society she lives in—but is she also a victimizer?

Yes, but we all are sometimes the victim and sometimes the victimizer. She isn’t more of a victim than anybody else, but she feels she is a victim because she is always alone. The rest of the family goes out to drink — she feels like a victim because they are always drunk. But Tyrone and his sons would say the same: They feel they are victims, because the woman who is their wife and mother is on morphine. We always find somebody else to blame.

You recently had a great success directing “A Streetcar Named Desire.” What was special about that experience?

It was an incredible ensemble, which is what I like — I don’t like to be Liv Ullmann, I like to be one of a group. “A Streetcar Named Desire” filled me with a lot of happiness.

What do you remember about Ingmar Bergman’s 1988 Stockholm production of “Long Day’s Journey into Night”?

I remember that it made a big impression on me. My best friend Bibi Andersson played my part, and I think I remember her the most. I came to Sweden that morning from the United States, and I thought, I don’t think I’m going to go see it. But I went, and I was so happy. I came up to Bibi afterward to thank her. I said, “I always knew you were a great actress but I didn’t know you were that wonderful.”

How did you prepare to play Mary?

I have never worked so hard on any role. She talks and talks and talks, goes from one sentence about one thing to another sentence about something else. Why does she change suddenly? You really need to do a lot of homework to figure that out. You should see my script—I have written so much in it you can hardly read it anymore. The director very often wants me to speak quickly, and I’m a slow person. I come from the north of Norway, and we talk slowly. In the end I did have to make things quick, to shift in a quick way. I didn’t understand at first why it had to be like that.

Everett Collection / Rex Features

Liv Ullman in 1973

Ingmar Bergman’s theater productions are legendary. Why?

I was in one play of Bergman’s. He came to Norway to do Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” He was incredible —a visionary, who somehow made everyone else want to be a visionary. He couldn’t be better than he was on film, but he was an amazing theater director.

James Tyrone, Mary’s husband, decided to sell out his talent for commercial success,

You have worked with many famous actors. Is there a James Tyrone lurking in each of them?

Yeah, in all men, not just actors—and there is a bit of Mary in all women. Since you mention James Tyrone, I have to say that Bj[oslash]rn Sundquist, my James Tyrone, is one of the best actors I have ever worked with. Gene Hackman, Peter Finch, Max von Sydow and Erland Josephson — he’s right up there for me.

What has the role of Mary Tyrone taught you about yourself?

I have learned that I also have secrets that I don’t want to show. I am like Nora [in Ibsen's "A Doll's House"] — I’m always smiling, want things to be easy for everybody. Underneath, there is anger, and a feeling of being victimized. I see that more clearly — because he is a great playwright, O’Neill has shown this to me. I am now discussing with myself how not to be Nora so much of the time.

—J. S. Marcus is a writer based in Berlin.

By JESS BRAVIN and EMILY MALTBY

A small-business group fighting President Barack Obama’s health-care law asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to add two plaintiffs to its lawsuit after possible problems arose with an initial plaintiff.

The case moved through the lower courts based in part on an assertion by Mary Brown, the owner of an auto-repair shop in Florida. Ms. Brown said her business planning was jeopardized by the need to set aside funds to pay for her health insurance beginning in 2014, when a provision requiring most Americans to carry such coverage or pay a penalty takes effect.

Two other plaintiffs also were listed: a retired investment banker in Washington state and the National Federation of Independent Business itself, the small-business lobbying group in Washington, D.C., that is fighting the law. But Ms. Brown was the only plaintiff the Justice Department agreed had legal standing to pursue the case.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Ms. Brown closed her shop in August and filed for personal bankruptcy the following month. Without owning a business, it could be harder for her to argue that the law harms her, and her financial woes suggest she could be exempt from penalties for not having health insurance.

The Supreme Court will hear the case in March, with a decision expected before July. The most significant issue is the one raised by Ms. Brown—whether Congress can impose the insurance mandate on Americans. In addition, 26 states are challenging a provision of the law that expands Medicaid coverage for lower-income Americans.

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The motion filed Wednesday seeks to add two NFIB members as plaintiffs: Dana Grimes, the owner of a roofing company in Greenwich, N.Y., and David Klemencic, who runs a flooring business in Ellenboro, W.Va.

The Justice Department, which said it didn’t oppose the motion, declined to comment.

Mike Carvin, an attorney representing the NFIB, Ms. Brown and other plaintiffs in the matter, said the group was confident Ms. Brown retained standing to pursue the suit. He said the addition of Messrs. Grimes and Klemencic, who filed affidavits on behalf of the organization at an earlier stage in the litigation, was a “belt and suspenders” effort at ensuring legal standing.

In an interview, Mr. Grimes, 50 years old, said that if he had to pay for health coverage, he would likely have to close his company, because he wouldn’t be able to afford new equipment.

“Every year, I have had to put personal savings into the business,” he said. “If the government says I or my employees have to have health insurance, I think they are overstepping their bounds.”

He hired his only employee, who works part-time, in October, he said.

Mr. Grimes said he once had health insurance that cost at least $5,000 a year but gave it up several years ago because he didn’t need it and found it too expensive.

Mr. Klemencic declined to comment.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Emily Maltby at emily.maltby@wsj.com

It was 4 p.m. on a recent Friday—a time of the week when I usually relax and leave the rest of my to-do list to finish over the weekend. But as this recent weekend approached, I kept pushing myself, heart pumping, to get to the bottom of my list of planned tasks for the week.

After years of working on and off throughout most weekends, I was trying a new approach by taking off at least one entire day every weekend this month, away from reporting, writing and all other work. Early on, I hated it. As simple as it seemed, sticking to a time-off plan stressed me out at first. What I didn’t see right away was that my little test was forcing me to improve the way I work.

Amid layoffs and burgeoning workloads, it seems, working any time, all the time, has become a habit. A survey of 605 U.S. workers last spring by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 70% of employees work beyond scheduled time and on weekends; more than half blame “self-imposed pressure.” Now, new research suggests some have reached the point where a paradoxical truth applies: To get more done, we need to stop working so much.

A groundbreaking four-year study, set for publication in the October issue of Harvard Business Review, seems to confirm that getting away from work can yield unexpected on-the-job benefits. When members of 12 consulting teams at Boston Consulting Group were each required to take a block of “predictable time off” during every work week, “we had to practically force some professionals” to get away, says Leslie Perlow, the Harvard Business School leadership professor who headed the study.

But the results surprised Harvard researchers and Boston Consulting executives alike. Working together to make sure each consultant got some time off forced teams to communicate better, share more personal information and forge closer relationships. They also had to do a better job at planning ahead and streamlining work, which in some cases resulted in improved client service, based on interviews with clients. Boston Consulting is so pleased with the outcome that the firm is rolling out a similar teaming strategy over the coming year on many new U.S. and some overseas projects, says Grant Freeland, senior partner and managing director of the firm’s Boston office. “We have found real value in this,” he says. “It really changes how we do our work.”

Other companies are putting the brakes on work in other ways. At KPMG, a professional-services firm, managers use “wellness scorecards” to track whether employees are working too much overtime or skipping vacation, a spokesman says. At Fenwick & West, a Silicon Valley law firm, “workflow coordinators” review attorneys’ hours to avert overload.

And at Bobrick Washroom Equipment, North Hollywood, Calif., a 500-employee manufacturer, staffers are expected to leave in time for dinner. “If you walk around here at 5:30, there are going to be very few lights on, and that’s what we expect,” says Mark Louchheim, president. He sees family dinners together as important to the well-being of employees and their children, and he also believes setting limits on work motivates people to work smarter.

In the Boston Consulting study, most of the four- or five-member teams were asked to guarantee each consultant one uninterrupted evening free each week after 6 p.m., away from BlackBerrys and all contact with work. Each team held weekly meetings to talk about the time-off plans, work processes and what consultants called “tummy rumbles”—gut worries or concerns about their project.

Requiring hard-driving consultants to take time off was “nerve-racking” and awkward at first, says Debbie Lovich, a Boston Consulting executive who headed one of the teams. Some fought the idea, claiming they would have to work more on weekends or draw poor performance ratings.

But the point of the experiment wasn’t to eliminate the “good intensity” in work—the “buzz” from constant learning and “being in the thick of things,” Harvard’s Dr. Perlow says. Instead, researchers targeted “bad intensity”—a feeling of having no time truly free from work, no control over work and no opportunity to ask questions to clarify foggy priorities, she says.

Ms. Lovich adds: “We wanted to teach people that you can tune out completely” for a while and still turn out good work. The work itself became the focus, “because if you know a night off is coming up, you’re not going to let things spike out of control,” she says.

After five months of predictable time off, internal surveys showed consultants were more satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance, and more likely to stay with the firm, compared with consultants who weren’t part of the experiment. As word spread, other consultants began asking to join the study, Ms. Lovich says. And some clients told researchers the teams’ work had improved, partly because improved communication among team members kept junior consultants better informed about the big picture.

Bobrick Washroom Equipment’s policy to get workers home for dinner came as a shock to Janice Blakely when she joined the company years ago after working “long, long hours” at an energy concern, she says. Seeing staffers at Bobrick leave by 6 p.m., “I thought, ‘Wow, this is not normal.”‘ But in time, the policy “made me look at my performance and tighten up on what I’m doing,” says Ms. Blakely, a marketing manager.

Mr. Louchheim, the Bobrick president, says that employees who habitually stay late may be revealing poor work habits. “We worry about whether they can delegate properly and prioritize their work,” he says. Adds Chris Von Der Ahe, a Korn/Ferry International recruiter who works with Bobrick: “People who do well there are well organized and able to plan their work well.”

Dr. Perlow says an individual worker can get similar results “by challenging oneself to say, ‘I’m going to cut off’ ” work at a certain time every day or every week. ” ‘Now, how am I going to get work done in the time I have?’ This is meant to open your eyes to the possibility” that the way you work can be changed.

In my own experiment, I have managed to keep at least one weekend day work-free so far this month. This has forced me to put proven time-management principles into practice: Plan blocks of work time and stick to the plan; set short-term deadlines to keep work from spiraling out of control; and keep up with email daily, to avoid backlogs.

The rewards have been surprising. On one recent Monday, after an invigorating weekend of working out, attending church and watching college football and hiking with friends, I quickly solved a work problem that had baffled me the previous week. Asked to assess my work this month, my editor, John Blanton, said my columns have been fine. “I’d say, from our perspective, start enjoying your weekends,” he wrote in an email.

This, I hope, will get to be a habit.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

By JUSTIN LAHART

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Veterans and family members wait on line to attend a job fair Nov. 23, 2009, in New York City.

Even when the U.S. labor market finally starts adding more workers than it loses, many of the unemployed will find that the types of jobs they once had simply don’t exist anymore.

The downturn that started in December 2007 delivered a body blow to U.S. workers. In two years, the economy shed 7.2 million jobs, pushing the jobless rate from 5% to 10%, according to the Labor Department. The severity of the recession is reshaping the labor market. Some lost jobs will come back. But some are gone forever, going the way of typewriter repairmen and streetcar operators.

Many of the jobs created by the booms in the housing and credit markets, for example, have likely been permanently erased by the subsequent bust.

“The tremendous amount of economic activity associated with housing, I can’t see that coming back,” says Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz. “That was a very unhealthy part of the economy.”

Reshaping the Job Market

Read more profiles of workers in different industries.

Tim Winter

Tim Winters, Aspen, Colo. Age 39

Hotel Director Forced to Give Up Own Home

After getting laid off in March from his job as operations director at a small hotel, Tim Winters could no longer afford his $1,200 a month apartment. He has been living at family members’ homes, an ironic twist for someone who often used to stay for free at hotels when he traveled. “It takes a lot of understanding and time to get used to living with other people again,” says Mr. Winters, who started his career in hospitality in 1996. Mr. Winters says he has applied for approximately 170 hotel-management positions and has had 14 interviews, but no job offers yet.

Daryl Jones

Daryl Jones, Tulsa, Okla. Age 45

Economy Chips Away at Cabinet Maker’s Business

Daryl Jones misses the smiles that would appear on clients’ faces after receiving the one-of-a-kind cabinets, bedroom sets and other wood furniture he built by hand while running his home-based business. But sales plummeted in recent years, prompting the third-generation craftsman to take a job building cabinets for corporate jets to make ends meet. Still, Mr. Jones is optimistic that one day he will return to his custom woodworking full time. “Once the economy bounces back and people feel comfortable again spending money, then things will start picking back up.”

Jeff Walker

Jeff Walker Brighton, Mich. Age 53

Auto Industry Executive Goes Back to School

Jeff Walker, a former auto industry executive, doesn’t mind being among the oldest students at Eastern Michigan University. “I’m happier than just being unemployed and looking for a job,” he says. In April, Mr. Walker lost his job as a vice president of operations at a small auto equipment supplier in Brighton, Mich., where he had worked for 22 years. Mr. Walker is studying technology management in pursuit of the college degree he started but never finished after high school. Now, he says, he just wants to “get out of manufacturing.”

Duane Dittbrenner

Duane Dittbrenner, Cleburne, Texas Age 50

Veteran Trucker Worries About Paying the Bills

Duane Dittbrenner was laid off last month from his job at Arrow Trucking Co. He has been struggling to find another trucking job in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “Where I live, most of it is hazmat and tankers,” says Mr. Dittbrenner, who has hauled big rigs for the past 20 years throughout the U.S. Mr. Dittbrenner says he is worried he won’t be able to pay next month’s bills if a new job doesn’t come along. “It’s just getting out there and pounding the pavement,” he says. “I’ll have one soon. All you can do is be optimistic.”

Michael Benabib

Debra Allicock, Brooklyn, N.Y. Age 42

Growing Demand, but Low Pay, for Home Health

Debra Allicock migrated to New York from Guyana in 2000 and took a job as a home-health aide, helping the elderly with errands, meals and light housekeeping. She says the relationships she gains are what motivates her to work 12-hour days despite low pay and no medical insurance. “You get to get very close and attached with them,” she says of her clients. Ms. Allicock says her services are in high demand. “Why go to a nursing home when you can stay in your home surrounded by everything you love?” she says. “Maybe one day someone is going to return that favor for me.”

Richard Hawthorne

Richard Hawthorne, Laguna Beach, Calif. Age 58

Real Estate Executive Tries a New Path

Richard Hawthorne has been out of work since June 2007, when he was laid off from a small commercial real estate investment firm where he was director of development. “In past downturns I’ve done well, but this downturn has me stumped,” he says. Mr. Hawthorne enjoyed his more than 30 years in commercial real estate. “There was something new and totally unpredictable each and every day to solve,” he says. But now, tired of being told he is overqualified for jobs in his field, he is launching a business advising financial institutions on how to eliminate investment property debt.

– Interviews by Sarah E. Needleman

Unhealthy but a boon for men without a college education. One in three jobs, or six million total, have been lost in the manufacturing sector since 1997, the last year the sector posted job gains. The upsurge in construction jobs accompanying the housing boom provided these workers in manufacturing with an opportunity to earn decent wages.

Now that door, too, has shut. With 1.6 million jobs lost over the last two years, the construction sector has accounted for more than a fifth of the jobs lost since the recession began.

For more highly educated workers, finance may no longer offer as many high-paying jobs as it has in the past. Thomas Philippon, an economist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, estimates that the financial sector’s share of the economy was nearly 20% larger than it should have been. Since the start of the recession, the financial sector has lost 548,000 jobs, or 6.6% of its work force. Mr. Philippon’s estimate suggests there will be further pressure on financial jobs.

In other areas of the labor market, the recession accelerated job losses that were probably coming anyway. In November, there were 36% fewer people working in record shops than two years earlier, according to the Labor Department. There were 23% fewer people working at directory and mailing list publishers, and 46% fewer at photofinishing establishments. Those are jobs that, with the advent of mp3 recordings, Google and digital photography, were likely disappearing anyway.

But as the recession hurt already ailing businesses, workers were forced into a sudden adjustment rather than the gradual one they would have otherwise faced. The recession also provided companies with an opportunity to cut jobs no longer as critical as they once were. That may be particularly true of the secretaries and mailroom clerks that advances in information technology have made less necessary. The ranks of people doing office and administrative work have fallen 10.1% since the recession began.

“Those are the production jobs of the information age, and they’re being to a substantial extent automated,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor.

The permanent loss of many jobs may keep the labor market from fully recovering for a long time to come.

Prior to the 1990s, jobs rebounded quickly once recessions ended. Payrolls fell by nearly three million in the deep downturn that extended from July 1981 to November 1982. But by the start of 1983, the economy was creating jobs again, and by the end of 1983, the U.S. job count had exceeded its old peak.

That was because more of the job losses were essentially temporary, with manufacturers and the like letting workers go with the implicit expectation that they would be hiring them back once the worst was over.

But since the early 1990s, jobs have been slower to recover from recession. After the 2001 downturn ended, job losses continued for nearly two years. It wasn’t until 2005 that the job count returned to its prerecession high.

Productivity-enhancing technology and competition from low-wage countries like China made more job losses permanent. And it took time for new jobs to be created and for workers to acquire the skills needed to do them. In the wake of a far deeper recession, creating new jobs and retraining workers to do them could take even longer.

It is anyone’s guess what those jobs will be. The Labor Department has done little more than extrapolate from recent trends. It expects growth in areas like health care, which has been one of the few bright spots. Given the exigencies of an aging population, that seems a fair bet.

One could also make the case that the U.S. is shifting from a consumer nation to a nation of producers, and that will lead to a resurgence in technology and high-tech manufacturing jobs.

But Harvard’s Mr. Katz warns that past experience suggests such conjecture is likely fruitless. “One thing we’ve learned is that when we attempt to forecast jobs 10 or 15 years out, we don’t even get the categories right,” he says.

Write to Justin Lahart at justin.lahart@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15