Search Results
Journal Article
Growing part-time employment among workers with disabilities: marginalization or opportunity?
Even though part-time jobs offer lower pay, fewer benefits, and less stability, voluntary part-time employment among disabled workers has increased over the past twenty years even as part-time work has declined among nondisabled workers. Does this trend signal that part-time work has become more attractive to disabled workers, or does it mean that disabled workers are being pushed to the fringe in the workforce? ; This article attempts to answer these questions by looking at the part-time employment experience of disabled workers since 1984. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the ...
Journal Article
Where There's Smoke...: The Wage Impact of Smoking
Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. While most research focuses on contemporaneous reasons for the wage differential, the research described in this Policy Hub article finds that decisions made early in life—about education, labor force participation, and occupation—contribute significantly to the wage penalty smokers face later, especially for men. Women are found to be judged more harshly by their current employers for their smoking behavior, and since quitting smoking ...
Journal Article
Electric Vehicles, Potholes, and Taxes: Who Pays the Price?
Automobile manufacturers and even some states have ambitious goals to phase out gas-powered cars. Currently, a primary source of automobile infrastructure funding is gasoline taxes. But as electric vehicles replace gasoline-powered cars, less gasoline will be purchased and revenues from the gasoline tax will fall short of what is needed to maintain roads. Consumers who do not purchase electric vehicles—perhaps because they can't afford them—are left to bear the burden of the gasoline tax. This Policy Hub article illustrates the inherent regressivity of the gasoline tax and then simulates ...
Journal Article
Mismatch of Jobs and People: Do Migration Constraints Put Racial Minorities at a Disadvantage?
Using the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2017, this article explores the evidence for potential migration constraints by comparing distributions of people and jobs across race and education. Using the Delta Index of dissimilarity, it illustrates a greater distributional mismatch between workers and jobs among racial minorities, relative to White non-Hispanics. This mismatch suggests greater migration constraints among racial minorities.
Working Paper
What's Behind Declining Birth Rates in the U.S.?
Using the National Survey of Family Growth, this paper explores reasons behind the falling birth rate in the United States. The analysis confirms that newer generations of women are less likely to have any children than generations that came before. Comparing outcomes among women at the same age, two sources for this decline are identified: (1) a dramatic decrease in the desire to have children, but only among the youngest generation in the sample (Gen Z) and (2) an increase in the medical difficulty of having children among all generations of women since the Boomer generation. Various ...
Working Paper
Earnings on the information technology roller coaster: insight from matched employer-employee data
This paper uses matched employer-employee data for the state of Georgia to examine workers? earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector?s employment boom of the mid-1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for individual characteristics before the sector?s boom, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than those who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is ...
Working Paper
Elimination of gender-related employment disparities through statistical process control
This paper proposes a novel approach that has the potential to hasten the eradication of gender disparities in employment. This approach relies upon the concept of statistical process control (SPC) to more systematically remedy disparate employment outcomes for women. SPC also serves as a new vehicle for conceptualizing the influence of industry on equal employment opportunity (EEO) outcomes. Using data from U.S. Current Population Surveys, we compare industries on EEO performance as assessed by a recently developed Systemic Gender Disparity Scorecard. The theory and practice of SPC suggest ...
Working Paper
Adjusted Employment-to-Population Ratio as an Indicator of Labor Market Strength
As a measure of labor market strength, the raw employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) confounds employment outcomes with labor supply behavior. Movement in the EPOP depends on the relative movements of the employment rate (one minus the unemployment rate) and the labor force participation rate. This paper proposes an adjustment to the calculation of the EPOP using individual microdata to account for both individual characteristics and the probability of labor force participation, which can used to assess the strength of the labor market.
Working Paper
Decomposing changes in the aggregate labor force participation rate
This paper presents a simple methodology for decomposing changes in the aggregate labor force participation rate (LFPR) over time into demographic group changes in labor force participation behavior and in population share. The purpose is to identify the relative importance of behavioral changes and population changes as driving forces behind changes in the aggregate LFPR.
Working Paper
A closer look at nonparticipants during and after the Great Recession
This paper uses matched individual-level data from the Current Population Survey to determine that around the 2008 recession, there was a significant upward shift in trend of the share of labor force leavers giving "Schooling" and "Other" as the reason for absence from the labor market. This trend shift is observed primarily among workers between the ages of 25 and 54 and is widespread across all educational groups with at least a high school degree. In addition, the upward shift in the trend of the schooling reason share occurred among workers previously employed in occupations and ...