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We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and these would account for close to 40 percent of their net worth near time of death. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance “boom.” In fact, from 1989 to 2007, the share of households reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points. The average value of inheritances received among all households did increase but at a slow pace, by 10 percent, and wealth transfers as a proportion of current net worth fell sharply over this period from 29 to 19 percent or by 10 percentage points. We also found, somewhat surprisingly, that inheritances and other wealth transfers tend to be equalizing in terms of the distribution of household wealth. Indeed, the addition of wealth transfers to other sources of household wealth has had a sizeable effect on reducing the inequality of wealth.

A vast literature in economics has examined the economic progress of African Americans during this century. Most of these studies have focused on income--or on even narrower measures of economic well-being, such as earnings--to assess the extent to which any gains made relative to other racial groups can be attributed to such factors as declining racial discrimination, affirmative action policies, changes in industrial composition, or a narrowing gap between the educational levels of African Americans and the rest of the population. However, studies of earnings and income, while important for assessing the extent to which labor market discrimination exists and the ability of African Americans to move closer to whites in terms of acquiring the skills and connections that are currently rewarded by the markets, provide an incomplete picture. This paper therefore explores how African Americans have fared in terms of wealth, a less well-known factor and an important measure of economic well-being.

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically and the American economy lost many high wage, low- to medium-skill jobs, which had provided middle class incomes to less skilled workers. Increasingly, less skilled workers seemed restricted to low wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. Although "good" jobs for less skilled workers are unlikely to return in their previous form, a number of sociologists, economists, and industrial relations scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called "high performance," is emerging, which offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national data set we find little evidence that high performance work systems are associated with higher wages.

The authors examine the effects of employment restructuring in the 1980s on white, black, and Hispanic men and women within a labor market segmentation framework. Cluster analysis is used to determine whether jobs can be grouped into a small number of relatively homogeneous clusters on the basis of differences in job quality. With data centered on 1979, 621 occupation/ industry cells covering 94% of the workforce are analyzed with 17 measures of job quality, ranging from earnings and benefits to skill requirements and working conditions. The paper finds strong support for dual and tripartite schemes that closely resemble those described, but never satisfactorily verified, by the segmented labor market (SLM) literature of the 1970s: the "primary" (independent and subordinate) and "secondary" segments. But the findings also show that each of these three large segments consists of two distinct and easily interpretable job clusters that are significantly different from one another in race and gender composition. The job structure has become more bifurcated in the 1980s, as "middle-class" jobs (the subordinate primary segment) declined sharply and the workforce was increasingly employed in either the best (independent primary) or the worst (secondary) jobs. White women became much more concentrated at the top, while white men and black and Hispanic women were redistributed to both ends of the job structure. Black and Hispanic men, however, increased their presence only in the two secondary job clusters. Meanwhile, the quality of secondary jobs declined considerably, at least as measured by earnings, benefits, union coverage, and involuntary part-time employment. As these results would suggest, the paper research found that earnings differentials by cluster, controlling for education and experience, increased in the 1980s. The male and female wage gap also increased, as did the portion of these increasing differentials that were accounted for by changes in the distribution of racial groups among clusters.