-
An Evaluation of the Gender Wage Gap Using Linked Survey and Administrative Data
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-34
The narrowing of the gender wage gap has slowed in recent decades. However, current estimates show that, among full-time year-round workers, women earn approximately 18 to 20 percent less than men at the median. Women's human capital and labor force characteristics that drive wages increasingly resemble men's, so remaining differences in these characteristics explain less of the gender wage gap now than in the past. As these factors wane in importance, studies show that others like occupational and industrial segregation explain larger portions of the gender wage gap. However, a major limitation of these studies is that the large datasets required to analyze occupation and industry effectively lack measures of labor force experience. This study combines survey and administrative data to analyze and improve estimates of the gender wage gap within detailed occupations, while also accounting for gender differences in work experience. We find a gender wage gap of 18 percent among full-time, year-round workers across 316 detailed occupation categories. We show the wage gap varies significantly by occupation: while wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. More competitive and hazardous occupations, occupations that reward longer hours of work, and those that have a larger proportion of women workers have larger gender wage gaps. The models explain less of the wage gap in occupations with these attributes. Occupational characteristics shape the conditions under which men and women work and we show these characteristics can make for environments that are more or less conducive to gender parity in earnings.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
LEHD Infrastructure S2014 files in the FSRDC
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-27R
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2014 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifications made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Occupational Classifications: A Machine Learning Approach
August 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-37
Characterizing the work that people do on their jobs is a longstanding and core issue in labor economics. Traditionally, classification has been done manually. If it were possible to combine new computational tools and administrative wage records to generate an automated crosswalk between job titles and occupations, millions of dollars could be saved in labor costs, data processing could be sped up, data could become more consistent, and it might be possible to generate, without a lag, current information about the changing occupational composition of the labor market. This paper examines the potential to assign occupations to job titles contained in administrative data using automated, machine-learning approaches. We use a new extraordinarily rich and detailed set of data on transactional HR records of large firms (universities) in a relatively narrowly defined industry (public institutions of higher education) to identify the potential for machine-learning approaches to classify occupations.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
How long do early career decisions follow women? The impact of industry and firm size history on the gender and motherhood wage gaps
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-05
We add to the gender wage gap literature by considering how characteristics of past employers are correlated with current wages and whether differences between the work histories of men and women are related to the persistent gender wage gap. Our hypothesis is that women have spent less time over the course of their careers in higher paying industries and have less job- and industry-specific human capital and that these characteristics are correlated with male-female earnings differences. Additionally, we expect that difference in the work histories between women with children and childless women might help explain the observed motherhood wage gap. We use unique administrative employer history data to conduct a standard decomposition exercise to determine the impact of differences in observable job history characteristics on the gender and motherhood wage gaps. We find that industry work history has two opposing effects on both these wage gaps. The distribution of work experience across industries contributes to increasing the wage gaps, but the share of experience spent in the industry sector of the current job works to decrease earnings differences.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The 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
-
LEHD Infrastructure files in the Census RDC - Overview
June 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-26
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, maintains a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2011 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureaus secure and restricted-access Research Data Center network. The document attempts to provide a comprehensive description of all researcher-accessible files, of their creation, and of any modifcations made to the files to facilitate researcher access.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
A COMPARISON OF PERSON-REPORTED INDUSTRY TO EMPLOYER-REPORTED INDUSTRY
IN SURVEY AND ADMINISTRATIVE DATA
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-47
The Census Bureau collects industry information through surveys and administrative data and creates associated public-use statistics. In this paper, we compare person-reported industry in the American Community Survey (ACS) to employer-reported industry from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) that is part of the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. This research provides necessary information on the use of administrative data as a supplement to survey data industry information, and the findings will be useful for anyone using industry information from either source. Our project is part of a larger effort to compare information on jobs from household survey data to employer-reported information. This research is the first to compare ACS job data to firm-based administrative data. We find an overall industry sector match rate of 75 percent, and a 61 percent match rate at the 4-digit Census Industry Code (CIC) level. Industry match rates vary by sector and by whether industry sector is classified using ACS or LEHD industry information. The educational services and health care and social assistance sectors have among the highest match rates. The management of companies and enterprises sector has the lowest match rate, using either ACS-reported or LEHD-reported sector. For individuals with imputed industry data, the industry sector match rate is only 14 percent. Our findings suggest that the industry distribution and the sample in a particular industry sector will differ depending on whether ACS or LEHD data are used.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Occupation Inflation in the Current Population Survey
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-26
A common caveat often accompanying results relying on household surveys regards respondent error. There is research using independent, presumably error-free administrative data, to estimate the extent of error in the data, the correlates of error, and potential corrections for the error. We investigate measurement error in occupation in the Current Population Survey (CPS) using the panel component of the CPS to identify those that incorrectly report changing occupation. We find evidence that individuals are inflating their occupation to higher skilled and higher paying occupations than the ones they actually perform. Occupation inflation biases the education and race coefficients in standard Mincer equation results within occupations.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Further Evidence from Census 2000 About Earnings by Detailed Occupation for Men and Women: The Role of Race and Hispanic Origin
November 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-37
A 2004 report by the author reviewed data from Census 2000 and concluded "There is a substantial gap in median earnings between men and women that is unexplained, even after controlling for work experience (to the extent it can be represented by age and presence of children), education, and occupation." This paper extends the analysis and concludes that once those characteristics are controlled for, no further explanatory power is attributable to race or Hispanic origin.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Emergence of Wage Discrimination in U.S. Manufacturing
June 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-18
This paper examines the hypothesis that wage discrimination emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. I test for wage discrimination by estimating the female-male productivity ratio from samples of manufacturing firms in the northeast, and then comparing the estimated productivity ratio to the wage ratio. I find that women did not face wage discrimination in manufacturing during the nineteenth century. In 1900 there was wage discrimination against women in white-collar jobs, but not in blue-collar jobs. Wage discrimination persisted, and in 2002 the female-male wage ratio was less than the productivity ratio.
View Full
Paper PDF
