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This paper analyzes the effect of recent technical change on the labor market and explains the observed differences in wage inequality among advanced countries. In particular, we focus on the difference between the inequality in the U.S. and in continental Europe. Many studies have indicated a rise in wage inequality in the U.S. over the past three decades. On the other hand, there has been little change in wage inequality in continental Europe. By introducing human capital investment into the model by Acemoglu (Am Econ Rev 89:1259-1278, ), we show that ex ante homogeneous economies would have distinct ex post wage distribution. The strategic complementarity between human capital investment and firms' hiring strategies yields the possibility that multiple equilibria exist, which explains the difference in wage distribution between the U.S. and Europe. In addition, we show that differences in tax or education systems can explain the difference in wage distribution between the U.S. and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945-2000) on the US economy. Our analysis relies on a computable general equilibrium model combining the major interactions between immigrants and natives (labor market impact, fiscal impact, capital deepening, endogenous education, endogenous inequality). Contrary to recent studies, we show that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. According to our simulations, the postwar US immigration is beneficial for all natives cohorts and all skill groups. Nevertheless, the gains would have been larger if the US had conducted a more selective immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much work on the relationships between crime, unemployment and inequality. At the turn of the millennium, 2.1 million people in the U.S. were in prison or jail, rising to 6.3 million if we include those on probation or parole. A key finding is that introducing criminal activity into otherwise standard models of the labor market can significantly affect the predictions of these models. The first section of this paper presents the worker's problem taking wages as given. This provides a natural extension to the textbook job search model to incorporate crime. Section II analyzes wage setting. This shows how various types of equilibria with different crime rates can arise for different parameter values, and how sometimes multiple equilibria coexist, with different amounts of crime, inequality and unemployment. This paper has developed a search equilibrium framework that can be used to analyze the interrelations between crime, unemployment and inequality. The model is essential to analyze feedbacks that can lead to multiplicity.

The majority of mainstream economists believe that globalization and trade liberalization have had a minor role in increasing U.S. wage inequality. A minority argues that capital mobility and outsourcing indicate a larger effect. This paper first surveys these views, and then argues that how we understand the policy consequences of trade liberalization helps determine the character our analysis of the issue itself. Thus, a shift in policy perspective, to consider the "equity costs" of trade liberalization in terms of eroded U.S. labor market institutions, produces a larger framework for analyzing the consequences of globalization and trade liberalization than is available in traditional comparative advantage efficiency reasoning. From this wider perspective, trade liberalization has likely had a greater impact on U.S. wage inequality than even the minority mainstream position allows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic inequality is soaring and the consensus in some circles is that corporations' myopic focus on profits is largely to blame. At first glance a stakeholder approach would seem an appealing solution: surely if the purpose of corporations was not wealth maximization for shareholders, but rather to create value for all constituents--thus including employees, customers, suppliers, and communities--we would make strides towards combatting inequality, the theory goes. Corporations themselves, through their powerful lobbying group, the Business Roundtable, recently disclaimed shareholder primacy and embraced stakeholder theory. However, far from successfully redressing inequality, a stakeholder approach is unlikely to achieve meaningful redistribution of power and resources to weaker constituents and would likely work in the opposite direction. We suggest that a stakeholder approach gives corporate executives both a sword and a shield with which to preserve their advantageous status quo. First, executives can justify stepped up lobbying efforts as part of their mandate to consider the interests of all constituents, capturing the agenda with respect to distributing more power and resources to weaker constituents. Second, because a switch to a stakeholder approach would appear as a significant change--despite not actually accomplishing meaningful redistribution--it would require significant political capital to be adopted, and once adopted would occupy an outsized portion of legislative and regulatory space, depleting energy and resources necessary to pass reform that is more likely to actually impact inequality. In fact, in reviewing the likely drivers of inequality, we find that key factors include higher concentration leading to the shrinking of the labor share and increased monopsony in labor markets, the gradual weakening of worker protections from labor market institutions, and giving up on progressive taxation as a redistributive mechanism. Broadening corporate purpose alone would do next to nothing to impact these fields, so to address rampant economic inequality corporate scholars will need to eschew the academic silo and reach across disciplines to identify more effective policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on inequality in the legal profession underemphasizes the macro-level factors that structure legal work. This paper introduces two measures that characterize local legal labor markets. The index of gender dissimilarity is the proportion of women required to move into the private law firm sector from the public sector to create gender balance. The index of hierarchical market structure is defined by a concentration of elite law graduates, highly leveraged law firms, lucrative billings, and corporate clients. Women's salaries increase more rapidly than men's in these markets, yet men continue to out-earn women. Furthermore, HLM models indicate that in labor markets with greater gender dissimilarity, women's wages are significantly depressed. We explain this in terms of mechanisms of opportunity hoarding and exploitation (Tilly 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically assesses the empirical evidence on the relationship between immigration and African American employment. Studies using various methodologies and data are reviewed: natural experiments, time series, and cross-sectional studies of local labor markets and intertemporal changes in the national labor market. We find that for African Americans as a whole, immigration may have little effect on mean wages and probability of employment. However, there is some evidence that immigration may have had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of African Americans belonging to low education-experience groups. However, even this modest conclusion must be qualified: the literature has many unresolved econometric issues that might easily undermine the received wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Britain and the US are committed to social and ethnic equality. But how much ethnic disadvantage is there in the two countries? Do minority ethnics fare better in one country than in the other? Is there progress over time? This paper examines the employment status and the class position of minority ethnics in the two countries using micro-data from the two recent censuses of the population. The analysis shows that most minority ethnics in both countries were heavily disadvantaged in employment and in access to professional-managerial (salariat) positions. Among comparable groups, people in the US fared better than in Britain, but those in Britain, especially those of the second-generation, were making more progress over time. There was also greater ethnic polarisation 99in the US than in Britain. Overall, while some signs of improvement are visible, persistent disadvantages are the defining feature of the social structure in both countries. Much more needs to be done to ensure socio-ethnic equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a semiparametric procedure to analyze the effects of institutional and labor market factors on recent changes in the U.S. distribution of wages. The effects of these factors are estimated by applying kernel density methods to appropriately weighted samples. The procedure provides a visually clear representation of where in the density of wages these various factors exert the greatest impact. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find, as in previous research, that de-unionization and supply and demand shocks were important factors in explaining the rise in wage inequality from 1979 to 1988. We find also compelling visual and quantitative evidence that the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains a substantial proportion of this increase in wage inequality, particularly for women. We conclude that labor market institutions are as important as supply and demand considerations in explaining changes in the U.S. distribution of wages from 1979 to 1988. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests whether places with higher exposure to unionization during the 1940s, due to their pre‐existing industrial composition, tended to have larger declines in wage inequality, conditional on local economic and demographic observables and regional trends. We find a strong negative correlation between exposure to unionization and changes in local inequality from 1940–50 and 1940–60. This does not appear to be underpinned by skill‐specific sorting of workers or by firms leaving places with high exposure to unionization. We also find that the correlation between exposure to unionization in the 1940s and the change in inequality after 1940 persists in long‐difference regressions to the end of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality isn’t driven by taxes—it’s driven by the power of capital in relation to workers. To reverse the rapid growth in inequality would require more rapid wage growth. Another possibility is a public wealth fund that would accumulate capital gains for workers. The Republican tax bill is likely to make matters worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article offers that Claire Jean Kim's theory of racial triangulation provides an ideal framework to study workers of color, the racialization of their labor and the ways in which actual and potential employers neglect and discriminate against these workers. Specifically, the piece determines that racial triangulation theory bolsters analysis of race-based power that employers exert in the construction and maintenance of racial inequality in regard to management of labor and employment possibilities for workers of color. A triangulated approach allows for a sharp focus on employer engineered labor market inequality as they oversee, hire, and refuse to be racially inclusive in hiring practices. Most significantly, racial triangulation theory addresses the forces of racial inequity within the meso-level of U.S. social structure when applied to study of organizational dynamics such as workplaces. I open the article by assaying historical and contemporary studies on workers of color to illustrate white employer domination and the ways in which workers of color are referenced to each other as inferior and superior workers. Subsequently, the article looks to fresh analytical directions in which sociologists can evaluate racism as a triangulated, multidimensional social force in the workplace and other social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the measurement of jobless recoveries and the elements that may explain their emergence. We first introduce a measure that maps the various elements that define a jobless recovery into a single number that we label the jobless recovery depth. We then construct a database of 389 state-level observations and study the cross-sectional variations that emerge. We find that jobless recoveries in the United States are not a nation-wide phenomena, but a local event confined within a cluster of states that expands slowly between 1975 and 2015. We find the state-level evidence to be consistent with theories that link jobless recoveries to unusually long expansionary periods, less dynamic labor markets, and the advent of the great moderation. The evidence is not consistent with theories that link them to decreases in union power, increases in income inequality, or increases in health care costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many aggregate-level studies suggest a relationship between economic inequality and sociodemographic outcomes such as family formation, health, and mortality; individual-level evidence, however, is lacking. Nor is there satisfactory evidence on the mechanisms by which inequality may have an effect. We study the determinants of transitions to a nonmarital first birth as a single parent or as a cohabiting parent compared to transitions to marriage prior to a first birth among unmarried, childless young adults in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, from 1997 to 2011. We include measures of county-group-level household income inequality and the availability of jobs typically held by high school graduates that pay above-poverty wages (i.e., middle-skilled jobs). We find that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to marriage prior to a first birth for both women and men. The association between levels of inequality and transitions to marriage can be partially accounted for by the availability of middle-skilled jobs. Some models also suggest that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to a first birth while cohabiting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between culture, inequality, and organized labor in the United States. We argue that America's exceptional cultural values are the key to falling union membership density and rising inequality. Cultural attitudes originated with the process of colonization in this country, particularly the embedded social structures that defined regimes of slavery and impeded the development of general trust. Citizens orient themselves toward policy positions depending on their 'cultural cognition.' Culture determines our world views and political leanings. Research shows that attitudes about collective action and social justice versus individual efficacy and social hierarchy predict policy choices. We offer historical and quantitative evidence to support our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how recent immigration to the United States has affected African Americans. We first review the research on the growing diversity within the black population, driven largely by the presence of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. As their children and grandchildren come of age, relations between immigrants and African Americans are complicated by the fact that a growing portion of the African American community has origins in both groups. We then review literature on both new destinations and established gateway cities to illustrate the patterns of cooperation, competition, and avoidance between immigrants of diverse races and African Americans in neighborhoods, the labor market, and politics. We explore the implications of the population's increasing racial diversity owing to immigration for policies that aim to promote racial equality but that are framed in terms of diversity. We conclude with suggestions for new areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore changes in career mobility in the US labour market during the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period in which career boundaries weakened and workers’ employment options became increasingly flexible. Using multiple panel data of a nationally representative sample of US employees between 1990 and 2003, the pattern of workers’ short-term movement across various types of boundaries in the labour market is analysed, as well as change over time and by skill group. The result shows that although the probability of switching firms increased for all workers, the career trajectories of lower-skilled groups showed increasingly opposite trends from those of higher-skilled groups. In particular, occupational immobility was reduced significantly for workers in lower-skilled occupations, yet their changes of occupation occurred mainly within their origin class, resulting in strengthening of class boundaries. Implications of this finding are discussed in light of recent debate on class stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data for 2003-10, this study examines whether the 2007-09 recession contributed to gender equality in married mothers' and fathers' paid and unpaid work hours. Trend analysis shows that the recession narrowed the disparity in both paid and unpaid work hours, as mothers substituted paid work for unpaid work and fathers' paid work hours declined. If the jobless recovery after June 2009 is included in the recessionary period, hardship in the labor market for fathers brought greater gender equality only in paid work. Relative to mothers and in an absolute sense, fathers' paid work hours and total workload declined and their personal care and leisure time increased. These findings suggest an alternative path for moving toward equality in workloads that entails gender-equitable job creation, living wage, and work-life balance policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective The maturing of the post-1965 children of immigrants and the recent emergence of immigrant settlement outside of traditional locations have implications for understanding immigrant economic incorporation. This analysis examines how changing immigrant geographies will affect the economic prospects of immigrants and a maturing second generation, and addresses sociological and economic perspectives on internal migration and immigrant progress. Methods Using the 2000 5 percent Public Use Microdata Files (PUMS), I employ endogenous switching regression models in analyzing the selectivity of internal migration and state residence patterns to the wages of immigrant, 1.5 generation, and U.S.-born workers. Results Nonwhite immigrant and 1.5-generation workers evade racial wage penalties through migration, but not through residing in emerging immigrant states. Conclusions Understanding the selectivity of internal migration to wages across racialized labor markets is important in assessing new immigrant geographies and prospects for the second generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the recent economic crisis has demonstrated, inequality often spans credit and labor markets, supporting a system of cumulative disadvantage. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this research draws on stigma, cumulative disadvantage and status characteristics theories to examine whether credit and labor markets intersect through the event of bankruptcy to disadvantage certain individuals over time. The transmission of bankruptcy's stigma across markets occurs in a specific legal setting where, even though the current U.S. Bankruptcy Code grants bankrupters a fresh start through debt forgiveness, the Fair Credit Reporting Act limits bankrupters' ability to begin anew because it permits employers to access credit reports. My findings highlight these ambiguities and show that, net of their previous labor market statuses, bankrupters spend less time working and have lower earnings than nonbankrupters. Thus, having become bankrupt exposes people to subsequent disadvantage in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses race, segregation and concentrated poverty in the U.S. through an examination of the country's geography, including cities, suburbs and rural small towns. The impact that the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 had on the socioeconomic conditions of ethnic and racial minority neighborhoods is discussed. An overview of the relationship between spatial inequality, which is also referred to as the "geography of inequality," socioeconomic mobility and access to labor markets, is discussed.

This research examines disparities in access to pension and health insurance plans between white, blacks, Latino and Asian workers in the American labour force. Using data from the 2006 March Supplement of the Current Population Survey, the analysis reveals that Latino workers are the most disadvantaged and white workers are the most advantaged. The entire gap in likelihood of receiving benefits between whites and Asians, and a substantial portion of the gap between whites and blacks, can be accounted for by socio-demographic and employment-related variables, but only a small portion of the gap between whites and Latinos can be attributed to such variables. The findings suggest that reliance on earnings for estimation of inequality underestimates the economic gap between racial groups. Explanations for disparities in access to employment benefits are offered and the relevance of the findings to other societies is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses long-standing normative claims that liberalism-understood as the priority of economic and political liberty, neutrality in the public sphere, the universal application of human rights, and the requirement to treat all subjects equally-is inadequate in the context of deep, migration-driven diversity. Beginning with the assumption that liberalism-as-an-integration-paradigm must be evaluated empirically, the article examines the immigration experience of two liberal states: France and the United States. Evidence from these important countries of immigration demonstrates that universal, difference-blind policies that are suspicious of claims to difference in the public sphere reduce prejudice and promote positive intra-community attitudes (France), while limited income support and dynamic labour markets promote economic integration (the United States). Far from being an inadequate relic of a simpler age, liberalism is the best framework for accommodating diverse societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial earnings inequalities in the United States diminished significantly over the three decades following World War II, but since then have not changed very much. Meanwhile, black—white disparities in employment have become increasingly pronounced. What accounts for this historical pattern? Sociologists often understand the evolution of racial wage and employment inequality as the consequence of economic restructuring, resulting in narratives about black economic fortunes that emphasize changing skill demands related to the rise and fall of the industrial economy. Reviewing a large body of work by economic historians and other researchers, this article contends that the historical evidence is not consistent with manufacturing- and skills-centered explanations of changes in relative black earnings and employment. Instead, data from the 1940s onward suggest that racial earnings inequalities have been significantly influenced by political and institutional factors—social movements, government policies, unionization efforts, and public-employment patterns—and that racial employment disparities have increased over the course of the postwar and post-1970s periods for reasons that are not reducible to skills. Taking a broader historical view suggests that black economic fortunes have long been powerfully shaped by nonmarket factors and recenters research on racial discrimination as well as the political and institutional forces that influence labor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gender pay issues in the US labour market are examined using 1990 and 2000 US Census data for three groups: the native born, immigrants from English-speaking countries and immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Quantile regression estimates reveal different patterns of wage effects across the wage distribution. Females have lower rates of pay across the entire wage scale. There is minimal evidence of glass ceiling effects. Immigrant women from non-English-speaking countries are argued to experience a double disadvantage effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the connection between isolation from job opportunities and the persistence of gender and racial inequalities in U.S. society. The authors utilize survey data to suggest that a significant white male advantage over white women and Hispanics in number of job leads. The role of social networks and social capital in sustaining this advantage is discussed. Inequality in the receipt of job information is tied to high levels of supervisory authority. Other topics include minorities in the labor market, civil rights, and equal opportunity.

This article analyses the evolution of inequality in yearly and daily wages between and within groups of blue and white collar, using the INPS-ISFOL database for the period 1985 to 1999 in Italy. Between-group inequality increased in the 1990s as clerical wages grew slowly, whereas blue collars' wages remained nearly constant. Within-group inequality increased only if measured by daily wages. The covariance structure analysis shows that inequality comes from persistent differentials among older workers and from high income volatility for younger cohorts. Within inequalities in office and manual workers are driven by the growth of permanency for the older cohorts (individual abilities, say experience, matter more) and by the growth of income volatility for the younger cohorts (luck in the labour market). Within each group, low paid workers during their career acquire earning gains for their abilities and reduce differentials with respect to high paid workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors present the rent destruction explanation for recent increases in inequality, which can be seen as one facet of a broader sociological explanation focused on class-biased structural change. A sociological depiction of the growth of earnings inequality since the early 1980s is presented using alternative partitions of the labor market, including the dominant sociological class schema that (surprisingly) has been used rarely to describe these trends. Thereafter, the authors attempt to strengthen the evidence for the rent destruction explanation by examining the increase in wealth inequality in the 1990s. After presenting these empirical findings, they discuss the extent to which rent destruction can account uniquely for these patterns, as well as other complementary sociological research on the growth of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand shifts that have played an important role in driving up wage inequality in the United States during the past quarter century are changes in the world of organizations. However, despite great advances in organizational theory during the same time period, there has been little progress in understanding how organizational processes shaped the evolution of inequality. Most theory and research focuses on processes internal to organizations. The author presents theory and evidence suggesting that progress can be made through greater attention to the consequences of organizational diversity for matching and inequality in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the empirical and theoretical research on the rising inequality trend in American labor markets has occurred within labor economics despite long-standing sociological interest in the structure of inequality and despite strong evidence that the trend was produced by institutional as well as technological forces. Several reasons for this imbalance are discussed. The fact of differing inequality trends in the United States and Europe offers an additional perspective on the potential explanations for the American trends. This comparative perspective highlights the role of institutions in producing inequality trends and suggests strategies for potentially productive sociological research on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an overview of the gender inequality in labor markets in the U.S. Trends in labor force participation, occupational segregation, and the pay gap; Determination of the gender differences in intermittence of employment; Proportion of women in the labor force.

The goal of this article is to summarize the main trends in the earnings and employment distribution in the United States using data drawn from the March Current Population Surveys covering the period between 1961 and 2002. We show that inequality started to increase for men in 1974, and for women in 1981, and for both genders inequality continued to increase throughout 2002. During the same period the wage premium of college graduates over noncollege workers increased substantially and the ratio of college educated workers to non-college workers also increased. These facts support the popular skill-biased technical change (SBTC) hypothesis. However, other facts raise some doubts about the SBTC hypothesis. First, the college wage premium is mainly due to workers with a postgraduate degree, but their increase in the labor force started much earlier than the spectacular rise in their wages. Also there has been no marked change in recent decades in the occupational distribution of workers. However, the earning premium of professional over blue collar workers followed the same trend as the college earning premium. And finally, the most dramatic changes in the labor market took place among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that examined why job histories differ, with particular focus on how the use of social contacts reinforces and reproduces inequality for low-income women in San Francisco, California. Discussion on variation within the labor market segment; Information on the factors that affect job search; Background on human capital theory.

Most research on earnings inequality has focused on the growing gap between workers of different races and at different education, age, and income levels, but a large portion of the increasing inequality has actually occurred within these groups. This article focuses on the extent and sources of "within-group" wage inequality in more than 500 labor markets in the United States in 1990. In addition to documenting that within-group wage inequality across regions varies more widely today than over the past several decades, the analysis reveals that two frequently cited explanations of rising wage inequality over time have little impact on within-group wage inequality when measured at the local labor market level: (1) industrial shifts and (2) increased technology and trade. By contrast, flexible and insecure employment conditions (e.g., unemployment, contingent work, and immigration) are associated strongly with high local levels of within-group wage inequality, especially among women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline in the unskilled share of French employment is chiefly due to the slackness of domestic demand for those industries with the highest proportion of unskilled workers. The spread of computers has not been particularly conducive to substitution between skilled and unskilled labor. We test and accept the hypothesis of technical-progress neutrality within French industries. The mechanisms that generate inequality do not appear to be the same in France and in the United States. The source of inequality isn't so much technical progress per se as its interaction with the institutions that regulate the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the changing inequality in the United States labor market. Factors which would affect the changes in the distribution of wages; Examination on the inequality of work timing; Explanation on the inequality in risk of injury.

Traditional cross-sectional measures find greater inequality in the United States than in industrialized Western European countries, but are unable to distinguish transitory from permanent inequality. With longitudinal data, we measure cross-sectional inequality during the 1980s using the Shorrocks measure of income stability to find the degree to which single-period measures exaggerate permanent inequality. Surprisingly, given the smaller social welfare system and the less restrictive labor markets in the United States, we find that both single-period inequality and the share of that inequality that persists over time are greater in the United States than in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]