Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'employment earnings'
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John M. Abowd - 6
Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 19
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Working PaperPayroll Tax Incidence: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance
June 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-35
Economic models assume that payroll tax burdens fall fully on workers, but where does tax incidence fall when taxes are firm-specific and time-varying? Unemployment insurance in the United States has the key feature of varying both across employers and over time, creating the potential for labor demand responses if tax costs cannot be fully passed through to worker wages. Using state policy changes and administrative data of matched employer-employee job spells, I study how employment and earnings respond to unexpected payroll tax increases for highly exposed employers. I find significant drops in employment growth driven by lower hiring, and minimal evidence of passthrough to earnings. The negative employment effects are strongest for young workers and single-establishment firms.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperIs the Gender Pay Gap Largest at the Top?
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-61
No: it is at least as large at bottom percentiles of the earnings distribution. Conditional quantile regressions reveal that while the gap at top percentiles is largest among the most-educated, the gap at bottom percentiles is largest among the least-educated. Gender differences in labor supply create more pay inequality among the least-educated than they do among the most-educated. The pay gap has declined throughout the distribution since 2006, but it declined more for the most-educated women. Current economics-of-gender research focuses heavily on the top end; equal emphasis should be placed on mechanisms driving gender inequality for noncollege-educated workers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSelf-Employment Income Reporting on Surveys
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-19
We examine the relation between administrative income data and survey reports for self-employed and wage-earning respondents from 2000 - 2015. The self-employed report 40 percent more wages and self-employment income in the survey than in tax administrative records; this estimate nets out differences between these two sources that are also shared by wage-earners. We provide evidence that differential reporting incentives are an important explanation of the larger self-employed gap by exploiting a well-known artifact ' self-employed respondents exhibit substantial bunching at the first EITC kink in their administrative records. We do not observe the same behavior in their survey responses even after accounting for survey measurement concerns.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTrade Liberalization and Labor-Market Outcomes: Evidence from US Matched Employer-Employee Data
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-42
We use matched employer-employee data to examine outcomes among workers initially employed within and outside manufacturing after trade liberalization with China. We find that exposure to this shock operates predominantly through workers' counties (versus industries), that larger own industry and downstream exposure typically reduce relative earnings, and that greater upstream exposure often raises them. The latter is particularly important outside manufacturing: while we find substantial and persistent predicted declines in relative earnings among manufacturing workers, those outside manufacturing are generally predicted to experience relative earnings gains. Investigation of employment reactions indicates they account for a small share of the earnings effect.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperPay, Productivity and Management
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-31
Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and across every percentile of the pay distribution. This pay-performance relationship is particularly strong amongst higher paid employees, with a doubling of firm productivity associated with 11% more pay for the highest-paid employee (likely the CEO) compared to 4.7% for the median worker. This pay-performance link holds in public and private firms, although it is almost twice as strong in public firms for the highest-paid employees. Top pay volatility is also strongly related to productivity and structured management, suggesting this performance-pay relationship arises from more aggressive monitoring and incentive practices for top earners.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperU.S. Long-Term Earnings Outcomes by Sex, Race, Ethnicity, and Place of Birth
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-07R
This paper is part of the Global Income Dynamics Project cross-country comparison of earnings inequality, volatility, and mobility. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files we produce a uniform set of earnings statistics for the U.S. From 1998 to 2019, we find U.S. earnings inequality has increased and volatility has decreased. The combination of increased inequality and reduced volatility suggest earnings growth differs substantially across different demographic groups. We explore this further by estimating 12-year average earnings for a single cohort of age 25-54 eligible workers. Differences in labor supply (hours paid and quarters worked) are found to explain almost 90% of the variation in worker earnings, although even after controlling for labor supply substantial earnings differences across demographic groups remain unexplained. Using a quantile regression approach, we estimate counterfactual earnings distributions for each demographic group. We find that at the bottom of the earnings distribution differences in characteristics such as hours paid, geographic division, industry, and education explain almost all the earnings gap, however above the median the contribution of the differences in the returns to characteristics becomes the dominant component.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTotal Error and Variability Measures for the Quarterly Workforce Indicators and LEHD Origin Destination Employment Statistics in OnTheMap
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-30
We report results from the first comprehensive total quality evaluation of five major indicators in the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI): total flow-employment, beginning-of-quarter employment, full quarter employment, average monthly earnings of full-quarter employees, and total quarterly payroll. Beginning-of-quarter employment is also the main tabulation variable in the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) workplace reports as displayed in On-TheMap (OTM), including OnTheMap for Emergency Management. We account for errors due to coverage; record-level non response; edit and imputation of item missing data; and statistical disclosure limitation. The analysis reveals that the five publication variables under study are estimated very accurately for tabulations involving at least 10 jobs. Tabulations involving three to nine jobs are a transition zone, where cells may be fit for use with caution. Tabulations involving one or two jobs, which are generally suppressed on fitness-for-use criteria in the QWI and synthesized in LODES, have substantial total variability but can still be used to estimate statistics for untabulated aggregates as long as the job count in the aggregate is more than 10.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperUnited States Earnings Dynamics: Inequality, Mobility, and Volatility
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-29
Using data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) infrastructure files, we study changes over time and across sub-national populations in the distribution of real labor earnings. We consider four large MSAs (Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) for the period 1998 to 2017, with particular attention paid to the subperiods before, during, and after the Great Recession. For the four large MSAs we analyze, there are clear national trends represented in each of the local areas, the most prominent of which is the increase in the share of earnings accruing to workers at the top of the earnings distribution in 2017 compared with 1998. However, the magnitude of these trends varies across MSAs, with New York and San Francisco showing relatively large increases and Los Angeles somewhere in the middle relative to Detroit whose total real earnings distribution is relatively stable over the period. Our results contribute to the emerging literature on differences between national and regional economic outcomes, exemplifying what will be possible with a new data exploration tool'the Earnings and Mobility Statistics (EAMS) web application'currently under development at the U.S. Census Bureau.View Full Paper PDF
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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
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Working PaperDoes Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms
January 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-02
We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the US Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts on employment, earnings and desirable firm characteristics for adults, but not for dislocated workers. Our primary methodological contribution consists of assessing the value of the additional conditioning information provided by the LEHD relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records. We find that value to be zero.View Full Paper PDF
