The current high rate of unemployment in the United States is primarily due to cyclical factors, not structural changes in the economy, according to researchers at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.

The study runs counter to worries among some top Federal Reserve policy-makers that undesirable upward pressure on wages, and thus inflation, could kick in even when unemployment remains relatively high — a situation that could have implications for U.S. monetary policy, Reuters said.

According to the research, recent college graduates are finding it just as hard to get work as other job seekers.

Because college grads are among the best educated and most mobile people in the labor force, their difficulty finding jobs suggests that it is labor market weakness as a whole, rather than mismatches between workers’ skills and employees’ needs, that is keeping would-be workers from getting jobs, the researchers said.

Recent college grads are also unlikely to be motivated by the extension of unemployment insurance, often cited as a reason for the elevated unemployment rate in the labor force as a whole.

“The current unemployment rate trends are reminiscent of the 2001 recession and the subsequent jobless recovery that continued through 2004,” research adviser Bart Hobijn and research associates Colin Gardiner and Theodore Wiles said in the bank’s latest Economic Letter.