As aging of the U.S. population places increased demands on public programs such as Social Security, an important question is how long older Americans are willing and able to work before they retire from the labor force. While studies based on household surveys have provided information on the role of savings, health status, pension and health insurance coverage, there is relatively little information on how workplace and employer characteristics affect the employment of older workers. In this study we use linked employer-employee data to explore the relationship between the characteristics of jobs held at age 55 and early retirement. We focus on a sample of 63-year-olds drawn from the 2005-2008 American Community Survey. We match this sample to information on their earnings, employment, employers and coworkers drawn from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data for the years in which they age from 55 to 63. We use employment status as reported in the ACS to split the sample into those who have retired by age 63 and those who continue to work. We then examine differences between early retirees and continuing workers in the characteristics of their employment at age 55, and at how these characteristics change as they approach age 63. We find that early retirees are more likely to be employed by larger employers at age 55 than are continuers. They work for employers with somewhat higher pay than do continuers, and are less likely to have young coworkers.
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Female Executives and the Motherhood Penalty
January 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-03
Childbirth and subsequent breaks from the labor market are a primary reason why the average earnings of women is lower than that of men. This paper uses linked survey and administrative data from the United States to investigate whether the sex composition of executives at the firm, defined as the top earners, affects the earnings and employment outcomes of new mothers. We begin by documenting that (i) the male-female earnings gap is smaller in industries in which a larger share of executives are women, and (ii) the male-female earnings gap has declined more in industries that have experienced larger increases in the share of executives who are female. Despite these cross-sectional and longitudinal correlations, we find no evidence that the sex composition of the executives at the firm has a causal effect on the childbirth and motherhood penalties that impact women's earnings and employment.
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Maternal Labor Dynamics: Participation, Earnings, and Employer Changes
December 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-33
This paper describes the labor dynamics of U.S. women after they have had their first and subsequent children. We build on the child penalty literature by showing the heterogeneity of the size and pattern of labor force participation and earnings losses by demographic characteristics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers. The analysis uses longitudinal administrative earnings data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics database combined with the Survey of Income and Program Participation survey data to identify women, their fertility timing, and employment. We find that women experience a large and persistent decrease in earnings and labor force participation after having their first child. The penalty grows over time, driven by the birth of subsequent children. Non-white mothers, unmarried mothers, and mothers with more education are more likely to return to work following the birth of their first child. Conditional on returning to the labor force, women who change employers earn more after the birth of their first child than women who return to their pre-birth employers. The probability of returning to the pre-birth employer and industry is heterogeneous over both the demographics of mothers and the characteristics of their employers.
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Income Effects in Labor Supply: Evidence from Child-Related Tax Benefits
May 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-24
A parent whose child is born in December can claim child-related tax benefits when she files her tax return a few months later. Parents of children born in January must wait more than a year before they can receive child-related tax benefits. As a result, families with December births have higher after-tax income in the first year of a child's life than otherwise similar families with January births. This paper estimates the corresponding income effect on maternal labor supply, testing whether mothers who give birth in December work and earn less in the months following birth. We use data from the American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the 2000 Decennial Census. We find that December mothers have a lower probability of working, particularly in the third month after a child's birth. Earnings data from the SIPP indicate that an additional dollar of child-related tax benefits reduces annual maternal earnings in the year following a child's birth by approximately one dollar.
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Comparing Measures of Earnings Instability Based on Survey and Adminstrative Reports
August 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-15
In Celik, Juhn, McCue, and Thompson (2009), we found that estimated levels of earnings instability based on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) were reasonably close to each other and to others' estimates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), but estimates from unemployment insurance (UI) earnings were much larger. Given that the UI data are from administrative records which are often posited to be more accurate than survey reports, this raises concerns that measures based on survey data understate true earnings instability. To address this, we use links between survey samples from the SIPP and UI earnings records in the LEHD database to identify sources of differences in work history and earnings information. Substantial work has been done comparing earnings levels from administrative records to those collected in the SIPP and CPS, but our understanding of earnings instability would benefit from further examination of differences across sources in the properties of changes in earnings. We first compare characteristics of the overall and matched samples to address issues of selection in the matching process. We then compare earnings levels and jobs in the SIPP and LEHD data to identify differences between them. Finally we begin to examine how such differences affect estimates of earnings instability. Our preliminary findings suggest that differences in earnings changes for those in the lower tail of the earnings distribution account for much of the difference in instability estimates.
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Fathers, Children, and the Intergenerational
Transmission of Employers
March 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-12
We document the tendency of fathers in the U.S. to share employers with their sons and daughters. We show that the rate of job sharing is much higher than can be explained by the fact that fathers and sons tend to live near each other. Younger children are much more likely to share their father's employer, as are children of high-earning fathers. We find that sons' earnings at shared jobs tend to be higher than at unshared jobs but see no statistically signi?cant di'erence for daughters. Much of the earnings differential is associated with jobs at shared employers being in higher-paying industries. When we control for employer characteristics, we see a much smaller son earnings premium for working together with his father. We also investigate the impact of sharing an employer on intergenerational mobility and demonstrate that for sons, sharing an employer at some point before age 30 is associated with a higher rank in the earnings distribution as an adult but that this association is independent of the father's rank in the earnings distribution.
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Interstate Migration and Employer-to-Employer Transitions in the U.S.: New Evidence from Administrative Records Data
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-44R
Declines in migration across labor markets have prompted concerns that the U.S. economy is becoming less dynamic. In this paper we examine the relationship between residential migration and employer-to-employer transitions using both survey and administrative records data. We first note strong disagreement between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other migration statistics on the timing and severity of any decline in interstate migration. Despite these divergent patterns for overall residential migration, we find consistent evidence of a substantial decline in economic migration between 2000 and 2010. We find that composition and the returns to migration have limited ability to explain recent changes in interstate migration.
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Just Passing Through: Characterizing U.S. Pass-Through Business Owners
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-69
We investigate the use of administrative data on the owners of partnerships and S-corporations to develop new statistics that characterize business owners. Income from these types of entities is "passed through" to owners to be taxed on the owners' tax returns. The information returns associated with such pass-through entities (Form K1 records) make it possible to link individual owners to the businesses they own. These linkages can be leveraged to associate measures of the demographic and human capital characteristics of business owners with the characteristics of the businesses they own. This paper describes measurement issues associated with administrative records on these pass-through entities and their integration with other Census data products. In addition, we document a number of interesting trends in business ownership among pass-through entities. We show a substantial decline in both entry and exit with less churn among both owners and owned businesses. We also show that the owners of pass-through entities are older, more likely to be male, and more likely to be white compared to the working population.
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Founding Teams and Startup Performance
November 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-32
We explore the role of founding teams in accounting for the post-entry dynamics of startups. While the entrepreneurship literature has largely focused on business founders, we broaden this view by considering founding teams, which include both the founders and the initial employees in the first year of operations. We investigate the idea that the success of a startup may derive from the organizational capital that is created at firm formation and is inalienable from the founding team itself. To test this hypothesis, we exploit premature deaths to identify the causal impact of losing a founding team member on startup performance. We find that the exogenous separation of a founding team member due to premature death has a persistently large, negative, and statistically significant impact on post-entry size, survival, and productivity of startups. While we find that the loss of a key founding team member (e.g. founders) has an especially large adverse effect, the loss of a non-key founding team member still has a significant adverse effect, lending support to our inclusive definition of founding teams. Furthermore, we find that the effects are particularly strong for small founding teams but are not driven by activity in small business-intensive or High Tech industries.
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The Parental Gender Earnings Gap in the United States
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-68
This paper examines the parental gender earnings gap, the within-couple differences in earnings over time, before and after the birth of a child. The presence and timing of children are important components of the gender wage gap, but there is selection in both decisions. We estimate the earnings gap between male and female spouses over time, which allows us to control for this timing choice as well as other shared external earnings shifters, such as the local labor market. We use Social Security Administration Detail Earnings Records (SSA-DER) data linked to the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine a panel of earnings from 1978 to 2011 for the individuals in the SIPP sample. Our main results show that the spousal earnings gap doubles between two years before the birth of the first child and the year after that child is born. After the child's first year of life the gap continues to grow for the next five years, but at a much slower rate, then tapers off and even begins to fall once the child reaches school-age.
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Trends in Earnings Inequality and Earnings Instability among U.S. Couples: How Important is Assortative Matching?
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-04
We examine changes in inequality and instability of the combined earnings of married couples over the 1980-2009 period using two U.S. panel data sets: Social Security earnings data matched to Survey of Income and Program Participation panels (SIPP-SSA) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Relative to male earnings inequality, the inequality of couples' earnings is both lower in levels and rises by a smaller amount. We also find that couples' earnings instability is lower in levels compared to male earnings instability and actually declines in the SIPP-SSA data. While wives' earnings played an important role in dampening the rise in inequality and year-to-year variation in resources at the family level, we find that marital sorting and coordination of labor supply decisions at the family level played a minor role. Comparing actual couples to randomly paired simulated couples, we find very similar trends in earnings inequality and instability.
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