Earnings Dynamics and Inequality among Canadian Men, 1976-1992: Evidence from Longitudinal Income Tax Records

Several recent studies have found that earnings inequality in Canada has grown considerably since the late 1970's. Using an extraordinary data base drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose this growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long-run inequality and an increase in earnings instability. The large size of our earnings panel allows us to estimate and test richer models of earnings dynamics than could be supported by the relatively small panel surveys used in U.S. research. The Canadian data strongly reject several restrictions commonly imposed in the U.S. literature, and they also suggest that imposing these evidently false restrictions may lead to distorted inferences about earnings dynamics and inequality trends.

Two-Sample Instrumental Variables Estimators

Following an influential article by Angrist and Krueger (1992) on two-sample instrumental variables (TSIV) estimation, numerous empirical researchers have applied a computationally convenient two-sample two-stage least squares (TS2SLS) variant of Angrist and Krueger's estimator. In the two-sample context, unlike the single-sample situation, the IV and 2SLS estimators are numerically distinct. Our comparison of the properties of the two estimators demonstrates that the commonly used TS2SLS estimator is more asymptotically efficient than the TSIV estimator and also is more robust to a practically relevant type of sample stratification.

Wage Bargaining, Labor Turnover, and the Business Cycle: A Model with Asymmetric Information

This paper presents a wage bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand shocks affect the equilibrium in a way that produces procyclical quits and countercyclical layoffs.These results are obtained without resorting to assumptions of nominal wage rigidity, long-term contracting, or aggregate price misperceptions.

Life-Cycle Variation in the Association between Current and Lifetime Earnings

Researchers in a variety of important economic literatures have assumed that current income variables as proxies for lifetime income variables follow the textbook errors-in-variables model. In an analysis of Social Security records containing nearly career-long earnings histories for the Health and Retirement Study sample, we find that the relationship between current and lifetime earnings departs substantially from the textbook model in ways that vary systematically over the life cycle. Our results can enable more appropriate analysis of and correction for errors-in-variables bias in a wide range of research that uses current earnings to proxy for lifetime earnings.

Earnings Dynamics and Inequality among Canadian Men, 1976-1992: Evidence from Longitudinal Income Tax Records

Several recent studies have found that earnings inequality in Canada has grown considerably since the late 1970's. Using an extraordinary data base drawn from longitudinal income tax records, we decompose this growth in earnings inequality into its persistent and transitory components. We find that the growth in earnings inequality reflects both an increase in long-run inequality and an increase in earnings instability. Our large sample size enables us to estimate and test richer models than could be supported by the relatively small panel surveys used in most previous research on earnings dynamics. For example, we are able to incorporate both heterogeneous earnings growth and a random-walk process in the same model, and we find that both are empirically significant.

A Portmanteau Test for Serially Correlated Errors in Fixed Effects Models

We propose a portmanteau test for serial correlation of the error term in a fixed effects model. The test is derived as a conditional Lagrange multiplier test, but it also has a straightforward Wald test interpretation. In Monte Carlo experiments, the test displays good size and power properties.

Pay Differences Between Women's and Men's Jobs: The Empirical Foundations of Comparable Worth Legislation

Civil rights legislation of the 1960s made it illegal foran employer to pay men and women on different bases for the same work or to discriminate against women in hiring, job assignment, or promotion. Two decades later, however, the ratio of women's to men's earnings has shown little upward movement. Furthermore, major sex differences in occupational distribution persist with predominantly female jobs typically paying less than predominantly male jobs. This negative relationship between wage rates and femaleness of occupatiop has stimulated efforts, in both the judicial and political arenas, to establish "comparable worth" procedures for setting wage rates.This paper etimates the relationship between wages and femaleness of occupation and finds that it is indeed negative even after controlling for relevant worker and job characteristics. The magnitude of the relationship, however, implies a surprisingly small effect for a comprehensive comparable worth policy. The estimates indicate that, even if comparable worth succeeded in eliminating this negative relationship, the disparity between mean male and female wages would be reduced by well under ten percent of its current magnitude.

Trends in Intergenerational Income Mobility

Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time-series variation in intergenerational mobility. Our results, which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975, do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility.

Real Wages Over The Business Cycle

This paper is an examination of cyclical real wage behavior in the United States since World War II. Like most previous aggregate studies. ours finds little cyclicalitv in aggregate industry real wage data. On the other hand, our analysis of longitudinal microdata from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics reveals substantial procyclicality. We find that this procyclicality is obscured in industry average wage statistics, and to a lesser extent in economywide averages, because those statistics are constructed in a way that gives greater weight to low-wage workers during expansions. The almost complete absence of evidence for countercyclical real wages suggests that movements along labor demand curves have not played a dominant role in cyclical employment fluctuations over the last 40 years. Instead, the procyclicality of real wages indicates that cyclical employment fluctuations have been generated mainly by shifts in labor demand. The sources of these shifts and of the positive slope of the effective labor supply curve, however, remain open to alternative interpretations.