Search Results
Journal Article
Evidence on wage inequality, worker education, and technology
The rise in U.S. wage inequality over the past two decades is commonly associated with an increase in the use of "skill-biased" technologies (e.g., computer equipment) in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have attempted to measure the direct link between the two. This paper explores the relationship among inequality, worker education levels, and workplace computer usage using a sample of 230 U.S. industries between 1983 and 2002. The results generate two primary conclusions: First, this rising inequality in the United States has been caused predominantly by increasing wage ...
Journal Article
Changing trends in the labor force: a survey
The composition of the American workforce has changed dramatically over the past half century as a result of both the emergence of married women as a substantial component of the labor force and an increase in the number of minority workers. The aging of the population has contributed to this change as well. In this paper, the authors review the evidence of changing labor force participation rates, estimate the trends in labor force participation over the past 50 years, and find that aggregate participation has stabilized after a period of persistent increases. Moreover, they examine the ...
Journal Article
Wage gap widens, especially in cities
Over the past 30 years, the gap between what workers at the high end of the scale earn compared with wages at the low end of the scale has widened dramatically. The divide is especially pronounced today in cities.
Journal Article
Neighborhoods that don't work
Unemployment is becoming more concentrated. Neighborhoods that had high unemployment in 1980 had even higher unemployment 20 years later. What are the possible reasons-and solutions-for this trend?
Journal Article
Urban decentralization and income inequality: is sprawl associated with rising income segregation across neighborhoods?
Existing research shows an inverse relationship between urban density and the degree of income inequality within metropolitan areas; this information suggests that as urban areas spread out, they become increasingly segregated by income. This paper examines this hypothesis using data covering more than 165,000 block groups within 359 U.S. metropolitan areas for the years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The findings indicate that income inequality-defined by the variance of the log household income distribution-does indeed rise significantly as urban density declines. This increase, however, is ...
Working Paper
Worker turnover, industry localization, and producer size
Empirically, large employers have been shown to devote greater resources to filling vacancies than small employers. Following this evidence, this paper offers a theory of producer size based on labor market search, whereby a key factor in the determination of producer's total employment is the ease with which workers can be found to fill jobs that are, periodically, vacated. Since the geographic localization of industry has long been conjectured to facilitate the search process, the model provides an explanation for the observed positive association between average producer size and the ...
Working Paper
Productivity and the geographic concentration of industry: the role of plant scale
A large body of research has established a positive connection between an industry's productivity and the magnitude of its presence within locally defined geographic areas. This paper examines the extent to which this relationship can be explained by a micro-level underpinning commonly associated with productivity: establishment scale. Looking at data on two-digit manufacturing across a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas, I find two primary results. First, average plant size - defined in terms of numbers of workers - increases substantially as an industry's employment in a metropolitan area ...
Working Paper
Do localization economies derive from human capital externalities?
One of the most robust findings emerging from studies of industrial agglomeration is the rise in productivity that tends to accompany it. What most studies have not addressed, however, is the potential role played by human capital externalities in driving this relationship. This paper seeks to do so using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census covering a collection of 77 (primarily) 3-digit manufacturing industries across a sample of more than 200 metropolitan areas. The analysis generates two primary results. First, a variety of education- and experience-based measures of average human ...