labor-economics

Trends in Job Instability and Wages for Young Adult Men

This is a paper in 'On the Job: Is Long Term Employment a Thing of the Past?', edited by David Neumark. New York: Russell Sage.

Comparing earnings inequality using two major surveys

Some previous research suggests that discrepancies exist between the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Current Population Survey in terms of earnings trends; when the sample is limited to full-time, year-round workers, however, the …

Trends in Job Instability and Wages for Young Adult Men

Data and measurement problems have complicated the debate over trends in job instability in the United States. We compare two cohorts of young white men from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS), construct a rigorous measure of job change, and …

Relative Distribution Methods

We present an outline of relative distribution methods, with an application to recent changes in the U.S. wage distribution. Relative distribution methods are a nonparametric statistical framework for analyzing data in a fully distributional …

Women’s Gains or Men’s Losses? A closer look at the Shrinking Gender Gap in Earnings

The recent closing of the gender wage gap is often attributed to increases in women's human capital. This explanation neglects the effect of growing inequality in men's earnings. The authors develop a decomposition that allows them to test how …

Economic Inequality: New Methods for New Trends

Two positions dominate the debate over the recent increases in economic inequality in the United States. The 'job-skill mismatch' thesis attributes rising inequality to growth in the number of high-skill, high-wage jobs that leaves less-skilled …