Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation
September 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-32
Abstract
This paper uses matched employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in wage inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers and firms based on underlying worker skills are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results suggest that the underlying dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are complex and are due to factors that cannot be measured in standard cross-sectional data.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
econometric,
quarterly,
earnings,
employee,
employ,
employed,
labor,
shift,
turnover,
workforce,
worker,
wage changes,
wage variation,
earn,
employment earnings,
earnings employees,
earnings inequality,
earnings workers,
employment distribution
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Standard Industrial Classification,
Financial, Insurance and Real Estate Industries,
Current Population Survey,
Alfred P Sloan Foundation,
Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperThe Measurement of Human Capital in the U.S. Economy
April 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-09
We develop a new approach to measuring human capital that permits the distinction of both observable and unobservable dimensions of skill by associating human capital with the portable part of an individual's wage rate. Using new large-scale, integrated employer-employee data containing information on 68 million individuals and 3.6 million firms, we explain a very large proportion (84%) of the total variation in wages rates and attribute substantial variation to both individual and employer heterogeneity. While the wage distribution remained largely unchanged between 1992-1997, we document a pronounced right shift in the overall distribution of human capital. Most workers entering our sample, while less experienced, were otherwise more highly skilled, a difference which can be attributed almost exclusively to unobservables. Nevertheless, compared to exiters and continuers, entrants exhibited a greater tendency to match to firms paying below average internal wages. Firms reduced employment shares of low skilled workers and increased employment shares of high skilled workers in virtually every industry. Our results strongly suggest that the distribution of human capital will continue to shift to the right, implying a continuing up-skilling of the employed labor force.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Dynamics of Worker Reallocation Within and Across Industries
June 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-02
This paper uses an integrated employer-employee data set to answer two key questions: 1. What is the "equilibrium" amount of worker reallocation in the economy - both within and across industries? 2. How much does firm-level job reallocation affect the separation probabilities of workers? Consistent with other work, we find that there is a great deal of reallocation in the economy, although this varies substantially across demographic group. Much worker reallocation is within the economy, roughly evenly split between within and across broadly defined industries. An important new finding is that much of this reallocation is confined to a relatively small subset of workers that is shuffled across jobs - both within and across industries - in the economy. However, we also find that even for the most stable group of workers, firm level job reallocation substantially increases the probability of transition for even the most stable group of workers. Finally, workers who are employed in industries that provide low returns to tenure are much more likely to reallocate both within and across industries.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperBetween Firm Changes in Earnings Inequality: The Dominant Role of Industry Effects
February 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-08
We find that most of the rising between firm earnings inequality that dominates the overall increase in inequality in the U.S. is accounted for by industry effects. These industry effects stem from rising inter-industry earnings differentials and not from changing distribution of employment across industries. We also find the rising inter-industry earnings differentials are almost completely accounted for by occupation effects. These results link together the key findings from separate components of the recent literature: one focuses on firm effects and the other on occupation effects. The link via industry effects challenges conventional wisdom.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe interactions of workers and firms in the low-wage labor market
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-12
This paper presents an analysis of workers who persistently have low earnings in the labor market over a period of three or more years. Some of these workers manage to escape from this low-earning status over subsequent years, while many do not. Using data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) project at the U.S. Census Bureau, we analyze the characteristics of persons and especially of their firms and jobs that enable some to improve their earnings status over time.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Relation among Human Capital, Productivity and Market Value: Building Up from Micro Evidence
December 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-14
This paper investigates and evaluates the direct and indirect contribution of human capital to business productivity and shareholder value. The impact of human capital may occur in two ways: the specific knowledge of workers at businesses may directly increase business performance, or a skilled workforce may also indirectly act as a complement to improved technologies, business models or organizational practices. We use newly created firm-level measures of workforce human capital and productivity to examine links between those measures and the market value of the employing firm. The new human capital measures come from an integrated employer-employee data base under development at the US Census Bureau. We link these data to financial information from Compustat at the firm level, which provides measures of market value and tangible assets. The combination of these two sources permits examination of the link between human capital, productivity, and market value. There is a substantial positive relation between human capital and market value that is primarily related to the unmeasured personal characteristics of the employees, which are captured by the new measures.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperUsing Worker Flows in the Analysis of the Firm
August 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-09
This paper uses a novel approach to measure firm entry and exit, mergers and acquisition. It uses information about the flows of clusters of workers across business units to identify longitudinal linkage relationships in longitudinal business data. These longitudinal relationships may be the result of either administrative or economic changes and we explore both types of newly identified longitudinal relationships. In particular, we develop a set of criteria based on worker flows to identify changes in firm relationships ? such as mergers and acquisitions, administrative identifier changes and outsourcing. We demonstrate how this new data infrastructure and this cluster flow methodology can be used to better differentiate true firm entry/exit and simple changes in administrative identifiers. We explore the role of outsourcing in a variety of ways but in particular the outsourcing of workers to the temporary help industry. While the primary focus is on developing the data infrastructure and the methodology to identify and interpret these clustered flows of workers, we conclude the paper with an analysis of the impact of these changes on the earnings of workers.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperJob-to-Job Flows and the Business Cycle
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-04
Job-to-job flows represent one of the most significant opportunities for the development of new economic statistics, having been made possible by the increased availability of matched employer-employee datasets for statistical tabulation. In this paper, we analyze a new database of job-to-job flows from 1999 to 2010 in the United States. This analysis provides definitive benchmarks on gross employment flows, origin and destination industries, nonemployment, and associated earnings. To demonstrate the usefulness of these statistics, we evaluate them in the context of the recessions of 2001 and 2007, as well as the economic expansion between the two. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earnings penalties for job transitions with an intervening nonemployment spell. This fall in job mobility is found within all age groups but is largest among younger workers. We also examine outcomes for displaced workers and examine labor market adjustment in several specific industries. Generally, we find higher rates of nonemployment upon job separation, increasing rates of industry change and higher earnings penalties from job change in the Great Recession.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEmployer-Provided Benefit Plans, Workforce Composition and Firm Outcomes
January 2005
Working Paper Number:
tp-2005-01
What do firms gain by offering benefits? Economists have proposed two payoffs: (i) benefits may be a more cost-effective form of compensation than wages for employees facing high marginal tax rates, and (ii) benefits may attract a more stable, skilled workforce. Both should improve firm outcomes, but we have little evidence on this matter. This paper exploits a rich new dataset to examine how firm productivity and survival are related to benefit offering, and finds that benefit-offering firms have higher productivity and higher survival rates. Differences in firm and workforce characteristics explain some but not all of the differences in outcomes.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEscaping poverty for low-wage workers The role of employer characteristics and changes
June 2001
Working Paper Number:
tp-2001-02
View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-05
Rates of hiring and job separation fell by as much as a third in the U.S. between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. Half of this decline is associated with the declining incidence of jobs that start and end in the same calendar quarter, employment events that we call 'single quarter jobs.' We investigate this unique subset of jobs and its decline using matched employer-employee data for the years 1996-2012. We characterize the worker demographics and employer characteristics of single quarter jobs, and demonstrate that changes over time in workforce and employer composition explain little of the decline in these jobs. We find that the decline in these jobs accounts for about a third of the decline in the fraction of the population that holds a job in the private sector that occurred from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s. We also find little evidence that single quarter jobs are stepping stones into longer-term employment. Finally, we show that the inclusion or exclusion of these single quarter jobs creates divergent trends in average earnings and the dispersion of earnings for the years 1996-2012. To the extent that administrative records measure the volatile tail of the employment distribution better thanconventional household surveys, these findings show that measurement of short duration jobs matters for economic analysis.View Full Paper PDF
