Decomposing Real Wage Changes in the United States (original) (raw)
Related papers
Decomposing Changes in the Distribution of Real Hourly Wages in the U.S
2019
We analyze the sources of changes in the distribution of hourly wages in the United States using CPS data for the survey years 1976 to 2016. We account for the selection bias from the employment decision by modeling the distribution of annual hours of work and estimating a nonseparable model of wages which uses a control function to account for selection. This allows the inclusion of all individuals working positive hours and thus provides a fuller description of the wage distribution. We decompose changes in the distribution of wages into composition, structural and selection effects. Composition effects have increased wages at all quantiles but the patterns of change are generally determined by the structural effects. Evidence of changes in the selection effects only appear at the lower quantiles of the female wage distribution. These various components combine to produce a substantial increase in wage inequality.
Selection and the Distribution of Female Hourly Wages in the U.S
Cornell University - arXiv, 2018
We analyze the sources of changes in the distribution of hourly wages in the United States using CPS data for the survey years 1976 to 2016. We account for the selection bias from the employment decision by modeling the distribution of annual hours of work and estimating a nonseparable model of wages which uses a control function to account for selection. This allows the inclusion of all individuals working positive hours and thus provides a fuller description of the wage distribution. We decompose changes in the distribution of wages into composition, structural and selection effects. Composition effects have increased wages at all quantiles but the patterns of change are generally determined by the structural effects. Evidence of changes in the selection effects only appear at the lower quantiles of the female wage distribution. These various components combine to produce a substantial increase in wage inequality.
2007
This paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of nonrandom selection into work. We show that worst case bounds can be informative. However, because employment rates in the United Kingdom are often low, they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials. Thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory.
Hours Worked and the U.S. Distribution of Real Annual Earnings 1976–2016
arXiv: Econometrics, 2020
We examine the impact of annual hours worked on annual earnings by decomposing changes in the real annual earnings distribution into composition, structural and hours effects. We do so via a nonseparable simultaneous model of hours, wages and earnings. We provide identification results and estimators of the objects required for the decompositions. Using the Current Population Survey for the survey years 1976-2016, we find that changes in the level of annual hours of work are important in explaining movements in inequality in female annual earnings. This captures the substantial changes in their employment behavior over this period. The impact of hours on males' earnings inequality operates only through the lower part of the earnings distribution and reflects the sensitivity of these workers' annual hours of work to cyclical factors.
2004
This Paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of non-random selection into work. We show that bounds constructed without any economic or statistical assumptions can be informative. Since employment rates in the UK are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials. Thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory.
Determinants of Wage Differentials in the US: A 2-Period Comparison of Age, Gender and Education
In this paper, we study how age, gender and education level affected earnings in the US in 1992 and how it changed in 2004. It is not an uncommon knowledge that a lot of work have been done on how age, gender and educational level affects earnings, however this work is peculiar in the sense that, we test theory and empirical work with randomly selected data. We find that as expected, earnings are positively related to age and educational level and earnings of females in both periods are significantly lower than their male counterparts. In addition, we find that earnings are significantly affected by age, gender and education in both periods under consideration.
Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages Over Time*
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008
In theory, growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce. Our paper uses Heckman's two-step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated Current Population Survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills. We find that selection into the female full-time full-year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s, and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition. We find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands' wages and National Longitudinal Survey IQ data as proxies for unobserved skills. Our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender.
Selection, investment, and women's relative wages since 1975
2005
In theory, growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce, thereby closing the measured gender gap even though women's wages might have grown less than men's had their behavior been held constant. Using the CPS repeated cross-sections between 1975 and 2001, we use control function (Heckit) methods to correct married women's conditional mean wages for selectivity and investment biases. Our estimates suggest that selection of women into the labor market has changed sign, from negative to positive, or at least that positive selectivity bias has come to overwhelm investment bias. The estimates also explain why measured women's relative wage growth coincided with growth of wage inequality within-gender, and attribute the measured gender wage gap closure to changing selectivity and investment biases, rather than relative increases in women's earning potential. Using PSID waves 1975-93 to control for the changing female workforce with person-fixed effects, we also find little growth in women's mean log wages. Finally, we make a first attempt to gauge the relative importance of selection versus investment biases, by examining the family and cognitive backgrounds of members of the female workforce. PSID, NLS, and NLSY data sets show how the cross-section correlation between female employment and family/cognitive background has changed from "negative" to "positive" over the last thirty years, in amounts that might be large enough to attribute most of women's relative wage growth to changing selectivity bias.
Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 2014
We develop a reliable Bayesian inference for the RIF-regression model of Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (Econometrica, 2009) in which we first estimate the log wage distribution by a mixture of normal densities. This approach is pursued so as to provide better estimates in the upper tail of the wage distribution as well as valid confidence intervals for the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. We apply our method to a Mincer equation for analysing the recent changes in the U.S. wage structure and in earnings inequality. Our analysis uses data from the CPS Outgoing Rotation Group (ORG) from 1992 to 2009. We find first that the largest part (around 77% on average) of the recent changes in the U.S. wage inequality is explained by the wage structure effect and second that the earnings inequality is rising more at the top end of the wage distribution, even in the most recent years. The decline in the unionisation rate has a small impact on total wage inequality while differences in returns to education and gender discrimination are the dominant factors accounting for these recent changes.
Black–White Wage Differentials in a Multiple Sample Selection Bias Model
Atlantic Economic Journal, 2008
This paper simultaneously incorporates two sources of selection bias in the black-white wage equations. It demonstrates that the biases due to an individual's propensity to be in the labor force and the firm's hiring practices are important in determining the black-white wage differential and failure to account for both biases will result in inaccurate estimation of the black-white wage differential. The results indicate a moderate contribution (4.3 percent) of the selectivity biases variables to the wage differential between blacks and whites. The results also show that the black-white wage differential for all black and white workers and across gender decreases as more sources of selection bias are identified and incorporated in the wage equation. The implication is that the observed unadjusted black and white wage gap may be overstated if the wage equation is not adjusted for selection bias. We found that adjusting for double selection bias in the wage equation, the black-white female wage gap is 26 percent larger than the black-white male wage gap, and 12.1 percent larger when we adjust for a single selection bias. The small total effect values of the selection bias due to an individual's participation decision indicate that the black and white labor force participation decisions may be similar, while the black-white participation decisions may differ. The results seem to suggest that at the macro level, the enforcement of policies related to racial issues in the labor market will likely lead to a reduction in the black-white wage gap. Also, policies designed to encourage black males' labor force participation and enforcement of anti-discriminatory laws may be effective in reducing the black-white male's wage differential.