Exploring Gender Differences in Employment and Wage Trends Among Less-Skilled Workers

In contrast to less-skilled men, less-skilled women have experienced growing labor force involvement and moderate wage increases. Compared to more-skilled women, less-skilled women have fallen behind. We investigated the reasons behind these trends in labor force participation and wages for male and female workers of different skill levels over the past 25 years, from 1979-2004. We find that less-skilled women have found themselves in an 'intermediate' place in the labor market. Like less-skilled men, they experienced deteriorating returns to education but, unlike the men, they benefited from a growing positive impact of accumulated experience on labor market outcomes. More-skilled women experienced both growing returns to education and greater accumulation of experience, leading to faster wage growth. In addition, at the same time that experience levels have grown, the returns to experience on wages and labor force participation have also risen among less-skilled women, while the returns to experience have declined among less-skilled men. The negative effect of children and marital status on wages and labor force participation has also declined markedly among women of all skill levels.

The State of Working America

[Excerpt] Like its predecessors, this edition of The State of Working America digs deeply into a broad range of data to answer a basic question that headline numbers on gross domestic product, inflation, stock indices, productivity, and other metrics can\u27t wholly answer: How well has the American economy worked to provide acceptable growth in living standards for most households? According to the data, the short answer is, not well at all. The past 10 years have been a lost decade of wage and income growth for most American families. A quarter century of wage stagnation and slow income growth preceded this lost decade, largely because rising wage, income, and wealth inequality funneled the rewards of economic growth to the top. The sweep of the research in this book shows that these trends are the result of inadequate, wrong, or absent policy responses. Ample economic growth in the past three-and-a-half decades provided the potential to substantially raise living standards across the board, but economic policies frequently served the interests of those with the most wealth, income, and political power and prevented broad-based prosperity

Three essays on poverty and inequality in the United States.

Each of the main chapters in this dissertation deal broadly with issues of poverty and inequality in the United States from an empirical microeconomics perspective. I approach these issues from two distinct angles. First, I examine various aspects of a large government transfer program that has received virtually no research attention from economists---the public provision of attorneys for poor people accused of crimes. One primary question I investigate is whether defendants who take up the services of a publicly provided attorney have better or worse case outcomes than they would have had they retained a private attorney. I use an instrumental variables approach to address nonrandom selection into the population of defendants who have a publicly provided attorney, where the instrument comes from county-level variation in eligibility screening practices. This approach identifies the effect on case outcomes of having a publicly provided attorney for defendants near the border of eligibility. I find that these marginal defendants have better case outcomes with a publicly provided attorney than they would have had with the private alternatives they could afford. Importantly, these results are agnostic about whether publicly provided attorneys are as effective on average as their private counterparts, but they do show that public attorneys are providing a valuable service to their target population. Second, I conduct an investigation of the gap in wages between men and women in the United States over the last twenty-five years. The gender wage gap declined dramatically during the entire period from 1979 to 2003 with the exception of a level period in the mid- to late-nineties. We offer an explicit treatment of age cohorts in an attempt to untangle wage differences between cohorts from the trends over time within cohorts. We find that the impressive decline in the gender wage gap in the 1980's was due largely to the fact that baby boomer women were much more positively selected into the labor force in their thirties than the cohort they replaced. The leveling-off of the wage gap in the 1990s was due to the fact that the baby boomer selectivity effect was a one-time shot; baby boomer women had very different selectivity in their thirties than the cohort that preceded them, but later cohorts were very much like the baby boomers.Ph.D.Labor economicsLawSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125501/2/3192778.pd

Low Wages and Scant Benefits Leave Many In-Home Workers Unable to Make Ends Meet

This paper directly examines in-home occupations and the workers who hold in-home jobs, including the hours they work, how much they earn, whether they receive benefits, and whether they and their own families are able to make ends meet

Low Wages and Scant Benefits Leave Many In-Home Workers Unable to Make Ends Meet

A paper which directly examines in-home occupations and the workers who hold in-home jobs, including the hours they work, how much they earn, whether they receive benefits, and whether they and their own families are able to make ends meet

The State of Working America 2008/2009

The abstract, table of contents, and first twenty-five pages are published with permission from the Cornell University Press. For ordering information, please visit the Cornell University Press at http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/.[Excerpt] In the popular media, economic experts will endlessly debate the dynamics and causes of the current downturn. They will parse the minutia of the data, with some claiming the worst is over while others argue it is yet to come. Sadly, most of these debates will likely have very little to do with the real economic challenges facing working families today. The men and women of the American workforce have worked harder and smarter to make the United States a world-class economy. In particular, when considering the 2000s, the U.S. workforce has chalked up some of the most impressive productivity growth rates in decades. And the mantra among economists and policy makers is that, as grows productivity, so shall living standards improve. Would it were so. The results highlighted in this volume regarding the income of middle-class families, the poverty of low-income families, and the historically off-the-charts measures of inequality tell a very different story. That is, they describe a different story. The story behind these unsettling trends—the chain of events and policy changes that brought them about—is more complex than the tale told by a few tables and graphs.ILR_Press_State_of_Working_America.pdf: 1910 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020