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Discussion Paper
Job Polarization in the United States: A Widening Gap and Shrinking Middle
Over recent decades, the U.S. workforce has undergone a dramatic restructuring in response to changes in technology, trade, and consumption patterns. Some sectors, such as health care, have expanded, while others, such as manufacturing, have contracted. These changes have altered the composition of the workforce, leading to a phenomenon often referred to as “job polarization,” an important factor contributing to economic inequality in the nation. In this post, we show that the wage gap between high- and low-paid occupations has widened over the past three decades. Further, we show that ...
Discussion Paper
Teacher Wages and Purchasing Power in the Fifth District
Teacher pay is notorious for being low considering teachers' vital role educating young people and preparing them for lifelong learning. At a national level, the difference between teachers' average wages and those of other college graduates has been growing over the past 25 years. But aggregate statistics obscure local variation in teacher wages. As seen in a recent District Digest article on resolving the gap in teacher supply, teachers' starting salaries vary throughout the Fifth District.
Report
Gender differences in the labor market effects of the dollar
Although the dollar has been shown to influence the expected wages of workers, the analysis to date has focused on the male workforce. We show that exchange rate fluctuations also have important implications for women's wages. The dominant wage effects for women?like those for men?arise at times of job transition. Changes in the value of the dollar can cause the wage gap between women who change jobs and women who stay on in their jobs to expand or contract sharply, with the most pronounced effects occurring among the least educated women and women in highly competitive manufacturing ...
Taking a Closer Look at Marital Status and the Earnings Gap
Research suggests that married men’s higher income account for a significant portion of the U.S. gender earnings gap. Does this also hold when race is considered?
Briefing
Slowing Growth in Educational Attainment
Research suggests the economy's demand for college-educated workers exceeds the supply, which might be contributing to slower economic growth. Improving students' preparation at the K-12 level could both increase the college completion rate and help those who are not college-bound choose the best paths for themselves.
Working Paper
Some Like It Hot: Assessing Longer-Term Labor Market Benefits from a High-Pressure Economy
This paper explores evidence for positive hysteresis in the labor market. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find that negative labor market outcomes during high unemployment periods are mitigated by exposure to a high-pressure economy during the preceding expansion. Breaking total exposure into intensity and duration suggests that these two dimensions have differing impacts. However, the benefits of exposure are not enough to overcome the greater negative impact of high unemployment periods on labor market outcomes of disadvantaged groups, making extension of ...
Working Paper
The gap between the conditional wage distributions of incumbents and the newly hired employees: decomposition and uniform ordering
We examine the cardinal gap between wage distributions of the incumbents and newly hired workers based on entropic distances that are well-defined welfare theoretic measures. Decomposition of several effects is achieved by identifying several counterfactual distributions of different groups. These go beyond the usual Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at the (linear) conditional means. Much like quantiles, these entropic distances are well defined inferential objects and functions whose statistical properties have recently been developed. Going beyond these strong rankings and distances, we ...