Search Results
Journal Article
Unemployment and wage growth: recent cross-state evidence
This article shows that even in recent years there is a relatively robust, negative cross-state correlation between appropriate measures of unemployment and wage growth.
Journal Article
Long-term earnings losses of high-seniority displaced workers
Journal Article
The decline of job security in the 1990s: displacement, anxiety, and their effect on wage growth
This article shows that job displacement rates for high-seniority workers and a consistently constructed measure of workers' fears of job loss both rose during the 1990s. It then explores the relationship between these measures of job displacement and worker anxiety and wage growth.
Working Paper
Recent evidence on the relationship between unemployment and wage growth
The current expansion has delivered the lowest unemployment rates in decades, yet nominal wage growth has remained relatively contained. This suggests to some a shift in the historical relationship between unemployment and wage growth. We look across the states for more timely evidence of a change in this relationship. We find some evidence that the elasticity of real wage growth with respect to unemployment has fallen recently, a result that is not due to a compositional shift toward college-educated workers. However, evidence of a weakened relationship is itself weak, depending on ...
Working Paper
Estimating the returns to community college schooling for displaced workers
Studies show that high-tenure displaced workers typically incur substantial long-term earnings losses. As these losses have become increasingly apparent, policy makers have significantly expanded resources for retraining, much of which takes place in regular community college classes. To analyze the effectiveness of such training, we link administrative earnings records with the community college transcript records of workers displaced from jobs during the first half of the 1990s in Washington State. We explore several issues of statistical specification for regression models quantifying the ...
Working Paper
Should we teach old dogs new tricks? the impact of community college retraining on older displaced workers
This paper estimates the returns to retraining for older displaced workers--those 35 or older--by estimating the impact that community college schooling has on their subsequent earnings. Our analysis relies on longitudinal administrative data covering workers who were displaced from jobs in Washington State during the first half of the 1990s and who subsequently remained attached to the state?s work force. Our database contains displaced workers' quarterly earnings records covering 14 years matched to the records of 25 of the state's community colleges. We find that older displaced workers ...
Working Paper
Mortality, mass-layoffs, and career outcomes: an analysis using administrative data
Seemingly short-term labor market shocks, such as job displacements, can have persistent effects on workers? earnings, employment, job stability, consumption, and access to health insurance. A long literature suggests such changes in workers? socioeconomic conditions can have potentially important effects on health outcomes, but existing studies associating job loss to health status face several problems of measurement and identification. This paper uses a large longitudinal administrative data set of quarterly earnings and employer records matched to information on individual mortality ...
Journal Article
Growth in worker quality
This article shows that increases in the educational attainment and labor market experience of the U.S. work force have led to an advance in labor productivity of more than 0.2 percentage points per year since the early 1960s. Estimates show, however, some declaration in the pace of labor quality improvements toward the end of the 1990s. Forecasts call for a continued decline over the remainder of the current decade.
Newsletter
Changing Labor Force Composition and the Natural Rate of Unemployment
This article discusses why changes in the composition of the labor force may have lowered the natural (or trend) rate of unemployment?the unemployment rate that would prevail in an economy making full use of its productive resources?to 5 percent or less. A lower natural rate may help explain why wage inflation and price inflation remain low despite actual unemployment recently reaching 5.5 percent?a figure only slightly above prominent estimates of the natural rate, such as that of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Demographic and other changes should continue to lower the natural rate ...
Working Paper
Wage differentials for temporary services work: evidence from administrative data
We use administrative data from the unemployment insurance system State of Washington to study the magnitude of the wage differential associated with work in the temporary services industry. We find that temp wage rates are 15% to 20% below the levels that might have been expected based on trends during other periods in workers' careers even after controlling for differences between temps and other workers. Comparing temp wages immediately before and after temp work or to the wages on non-temp jobs begun during the same period as workers were in the temp industry yields estimates of the temp ...