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What Does the Changing Sectoral Composition of the Economy Mean for Workers?
Over the past quarter of a century, the share of jobs in the U.S. economy in manufacturing has declined, while the share of jobs in services has risen. A common view is that because manufacturing jobs are relatively high-paying jobs, this shift has been negative for workers. However, jobs also differ in other ways, so looking only at pay gives an incomplete picture.
Working Paper
Reconsidering the Consequences of Worker Displacements : Firm versus Worker Perspective
Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching survey data on worker-supplied reasons for separations with administrative data. Workers exhibit substantially different earnings dynamics in mass layoffs depending on the reason for separation. Using a new methodology to account for the increased separation rates across all survey responses during a mass ...
Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Minimum Wage: A Putty-Clay Approach
We document two new facts about the market-level response to minimum wage hikes: firm exit and entry both rise. These results pose a puzzle: canonical models of firm dynamics predict that exit rises but that entry falls. We develop a model of firm dynamics based on putty-clay technology and show that it is consistent with the increase in both exit and entry. The putty-clay model is also consistent with the small short-run employment effects of minimum wage hikes commonly found in empirical work. However, unlike monopsony-based explanations for small short-run employment effects, the model ...