The Loss in Efficiency from Using Grouped Data
subject- – WP289
- – 1995-06-01
- – application/pdf
Family Income Mobility -- How Much Is There and Has It Changed?
subject- – WP398
- – 1997-12-01
- – application/pdf
An Analysis of the Impact of Sample Attrition on the Second Generation of Respondents in the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics
subject- – WP399
- – 1997-11-01
- – application/pdf
An Analysis of Sample Attrition in Panel Data: The Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics
description- – By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the estimates of several sets of regression coefficients. We provide a statistical framework for conducting tests for attrition bias that draws a sharp distinction between selection on unobservables and on observables and that shows that weighted least squares can generate consistent parameter estimates when selection is based on observables, even when they are endogenous. Our empirical analysis shows that attrition is highly selective and is concentrated among lower socioeconomic status individuals. We also show that attrition is concentrated among those with more unstable earnings, marriage, and migration histories. Nevertheless, we find that these variables explain very little of the attrition in the sample, and that the selection that occurs is moderated by regression-to-the-mean effects from selection on transitory components that fade over time. Consequently, despite the large amount of attrition, we find no strong evidence that attrition has seriously distorted the representativeness of the PSID through 1989, and considerable evidence that its cross sectional representativeness has remained roughly intact.
- – WP394
- – 1997-11-01
- – application/pdf
Changes in Home Production and Trends in Economic Inequality
description- – Previous studies of trends in inequality have ignored changes in the distribution of home production. This paper asks whether including the value of home production affects the trend in inequality of families. During the 1980s household money income grew at a slow rate but inequality increased. At the same time home production declined somewhat overall, but it declined more for high income households than for low income household. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data we develop three methods to adjust household money income for the value of home production. We then compare trends in the level and distribution of these measures of adjusted income to the trends in the level and distribution of money income. Income adjusted for the value of home production is more equally distributed than unadjusted income, but inequality of adjusted income grew during the 1980s. These conclusions are the same regardless of the method for adjusting income.
- – WP382
- – 1997-09-01
- – application/pdf
The Impact of Changes in Public Employment on Low Wage Labor Markets
subject- – WP397
- – 1997-07-10
- – application/pdf
Job Instability and Insecurity for Males and Females in the 1980s and 1990s
description- – This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide evidence on changes in short term job turnover using a previously underutilized data source, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The results from the SIPP are contrasted with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a more widely used data set. The second objective of the paper is to describe the changes in the events accompanying job turnover. The implicit normative assumption behind much of the public discussion of job turnover is that turnover is undesirable because it is either"involuntary"or leads to worsened outcomes, such as an increase in the probability of unemployment a or decrease in wages. We, therefore, also examine several of these outcomes to see if the perception that conditions have worsened reflects changes in these events
- – WP408
- – 1999-01-01
- – application/pdf
Have Recent College Graduates Experienced Worsening Wage and Job Distributions?
description- – This article examines whether recent college graduates have fared as well as their predecessors. We examine changes in both the wage and occupational distributions. Specifically, we explore the claim that college educated workers are increasingly likely to be in"non-college"occupations. The latter are defined using standard economic concepts rather than the subjective groupings of occupations used in previous studies. We show that changes in the wage distribution and changes in the proportion of college-educated workers in"non-college"jobs reflect continued improvements through the mid-1980s, but a deterioration in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- – WP412
- – 1998-10-01
- – application/pdf
Interim Report on the Impact of Increasing Earnings Inequality on Retirement Decisions and the Distribution of Social Security Benefits
description- – The focus of the overall project is on the distributional implications of changes in labor market outcomes on retirement labor force participation and income. Rising average real wages may well have led to earlier retirement and higher benefits for the average members of recent cohorts. But focusing on the average is likely to be highly misleading. During a time of rising inequality persons at the bottom of the wage distribution are unlikely to have retirement experiences that resemble the average experience.
- – 1999-11-01
- – application/pdf
Returns to Tenure and Experience Revisited--Do Less Educated Workers Gain Less from Work Experience?
description- – This paper explores whether within job and between job wage growth is lower for less-educated workers.While a simple model of heterogeneous learning ability predicts that individuals with low learning ability will have flatter wage profiles,this prediction has been largely ignored in the recent welfare reform debates. The key econometric problem in estimating returns to tenure and experience is that wages depend on the unobservable job match component, which is endogenous. We depart from the standard method for dealing with this problem in one important way.We show that this alternative implies that wages grow with the number of previous successful job matches. In our empirical work we show that this source of between job wage growth is large. Furthermore, we show that this source of wage growth,as well as the standard returns to tenure and experience,are substantially smaller for the least educated.
- – WP473
- – 2000-11-28
- – application/pdf
Stepping-stone Jobs: Theory and Evidence
description- – This paper explores the wage and job dynamics of less-skilled workers by estimating a structural model in which agents choose among jobs that differ in initial wage and wage growth. The model also formalizes the intuitive notion that some of these jobs offer"stepping stones"to better jobs. The estimated model assumes that job offers consist of three attributes: an initial wage, an expected wage growth, and an indicator of the distribution from which future offers will come. We derive the conditions under which agents accept these offers and the effect of involuntary terminations on the acceptance decision. This model shows that the probability of leaving an employer depends both on the slope and intercept of the current and offered jobs and the probability of gaining access to the dominant wage offer distribution. We use the SIPP to estimate this model, which allows us to recover parameters of the wage offer distributions and the probability that a job is a stepping stone job. Our empirical work indicates that wage offer distributions vary systematically with the slope and intercept of wages in the current job and that there is a non-zero probability of being offered a stepping stone job.
- – WP427
- – 2001-12-01
- – application/pdf
Is the Proportion of College Workers in 'Non-College' Jobs Increasing?
description- – This paper explores the claim that college educated workers are increasingly likely to be in"non-college"occupations. We provide a conceptual framework which gives analytical content to the previously vague distinction between college and non-college jobs. This framework is used to show that skill bias technological change will to lead to a decline in the proportion of college workers in non-college jobs. This prediction is supported by the data.
- – Classification- JEL: WP429
- – 2001-07-01
- – application/pdf
Wage Mobility within and between Jobs
description- – This paper presents evidence on the extent of wage mobility both while working for the same firm and when moving to a new firm. We find that mean wage growth between jobs is large in comparison to wage growth while working for the same employer,especially for less educated workers who experience low mean wage growth between jobs but even lower wage growth while working for the same employer.There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in wage growth both within and between firms. We, therefore, focus on both the means of the wage change distributions and on the probability that a worker does not experience real wage growth either while working for the same employer or moving to a new employer. We find that while real wages do grow with experience on the average job, a substantial proportion of workers experience real declines in wages while working for the same employer or moving to a new employer.
- – WP486
- – 2001-04-03
- – application/pdf
On the Evaluation of Economic Mobility
description- – This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to second-period risk. We construct extended Atkinson indices that allow us to quantify the relative impact of reversal and time independence. We apply our approach to the comparison of income mobility in Germany and in the United States. We find that the ranking of Germany and the US on the extent of reversal depends on the degree of aversion to inequality. Reversal has a higher impact in the US than in Germany for lower degrees of aversion to multi-period inequality, while reversal has higher impact in Germany for higher degrees of inequality aversion. By contrast, Americans gain more than Germans from origin independence for a large range of degrees of inequality aversion.
- – WP459
- – 2001-03-01
- – application/pdf
Income Mobility and Exits from Poverty of American Children, 1970-1992
description- – This paper asks two questions about child poverty dynamics. The first is whether long-run transitions out of poverty have changed. The second is whether the events associated with exits from poverty have changed. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to contrast the patterns of children 0 to 5 over the 1970's to patterns for similar children over the 1980's. We find that roughly half of the children who were in poor families at the start of each decade remained poor. For black children and children in female headed households, both the relative and absolute mobility are considerably lower. These mobility rates show no significant changes over time. Likewise, the events associated with exits out of poverty are remarkably stable.
- – WP430
- – 2001-02-15
- – application/pdf
Can Work Alter Welfare Recipients' Beliefs about How They Will Fare in the Labor Market?
description- – Some public policies aimed at integrating welfare recipients into the world of work are predicated on the premise that getting welfare recipients to work will change their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the rationale for these policies and concludes that a plausible argument can be made on the basis of concepts developed by social psychologists and by economists. The prediction that work affects beliefs is tested using a unique data set that allows us to estimate the causal effect. We find that exogenous increases in work induced by an experimental tax credit led to the predicted changes in self-efficacy.
- – WP567
- – 2003-06-01
- – application/pdf
Downward Nominal Wage Flexibility: Real or Measurement Error?
description- – This paper presents a new method to correct for measurement error in wage data and applies this method to address an old question. How much downward wage flexibility is there in the U.S? We apply standard methods developed by Bai and Perron (1998b) to identify structural breaks in time series data. Applying these methods to wage histories allows us to identify when each person experienced a change in nominal wages. The length of the period of constant nominal wages is left unrestricted and is allowed to differ across individuals, as is the size and direction of the nominal wage change. We apply these methods to data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The evidence we provide indicates that the probability of a cut in nominal wages is substantially overstated in data that is not corrected for measurement error.
- – WP611
- – 2004-10-01
- – application/pdf
Do Earnings Subsidies Affect Job Choice? The Impact of SSP Subsidies on Wage Growth
description- – This paper asks whether wage subsidies encourages participants to move into jobs with greater wage growth. We provide an analytical framework that identifies the key causal links between earnings subsidies and both within-and between-job wage growth. This framework highlights the importance of the form of the subsidy on the decision about the type of job to accept. We find that the subsidy will lead participants to place a higher value on jobs with wage growth if the relationship between pre-and post-subsidy earnings is convex, but the subsidy is predicted to have no effect on within-job wage growth if the transformation is linear. The subsidy is also predicted to affect between-job wage growth by increasing on-the- job search and altering the reservation wage. We use this framework to analyze the effects of the Canadian Self-Sufficiency Project experiment. We find that this subsidy did not affect within-job wage growth but did increase wage gains between jobs.
- – WP498
- – 2004-08-01
- – application/pdf
Changes in the Distribution of Long-Run Earnings and Retirement Incomes- Have Recent Cohorts Fallen Behind?
description- – This study is motivated by the well-documented increase in wage inequality during the 1980s and the continued high levels of inequality during the 1990s. Specifically, we examine changes in the distribution of long-run earnings and changes in economic mobility for recent cohorts. These cohorts, who either entered retirement in the 1990s or are nearing retirement, experienced very different labor market conditions during their working lives than did earlier cohorts. Economic growth led to higher mean earnings for recent cohorts but the distribution of yearly earnings became less equal. As a result of these changes, the average worker nearing retirement had higher long-run earnings than members of previous cohorts. This, however, need not have translated into higher long-run earnings across the board. Those at the bottom of the distribution of long-run earnings might actually have had lower accumulated earnings than previous cohorts if the gains from growth were more than offset by the increase in inequality of earnings during the 1980s. If the accumulated earnings of those at the bottom of the distribution fell, then this could have had an impact both on decisions about whether to continue to work after the period of normal retirement and on Social Security benefits. The second, and related, policy question is whether mobility has increased. If mobility has increased, then this may partially offset the impact of the increase in earnings inequality. Outcomes may be less equal, but there is less chance of being stuck with a bad outcome. Our ability to measure earnings mobility for five cohorts spanning a twenty-five-year period allows us to address this important question
- – 2005-01-01
- – application/pdf
Validation Study of Earnings Data in the SIPP--Do Older Workers Have Larger Measurement Error?
description- – The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) is a potentially useful data set to study earnings and retirement dynamics of older workers. Respondents' self-reported work and earnings in the SIPP are, however, likely to be measured with error, and this measurement error may be particularly large for older respondents who work non-standard hours. We explore the extent of measurement error by comparing SIPP employment and earnings data to administrative records contained in the matched Detail Earning Record.
- – 2005-05-01
- – application/pdf
0-20 of 21 | next
![[x]](/static/imgs/cross.gif)