Women still earn less than men, but they’ve narrowed the gap because they tend to work in jobs that require more social and analytical skills, a new study from the Pew Research Center finds. . . Women’s pay went up 32 percent while men’s pay went down 3 percent from 1980 to 2015, according to the study, “The State of American Jobs.”
The shifting demand for skills in the modern workplace may be working to the benefit of women. Women, who represent 47% of the overall workforce, make up the majority of workers in jobs where social or analytical skills are relatively more important, 55% and 52%, respectively. For their part, men are relatively more engaged in jobs calling for more intensive physical and manual skills, making up 70% of workers in those occupations. This is likely to have contributed to the shrinking of the gender pay gap from 1980 to 2015 given that wages are rising much faster in jobs requiring social and analytical skills.
Since the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced low real GDP growth and low real interest rates, including for long maturities. We show that these developments were largely predictable by calibrating an overlapping-generation model with a rich demographic structure to observed and projected changes in U.S. population, family composition, life expectancy, and labor market activity. The model accounts for a 1 ¼ percentage-point decline in both real GDP growth and the equilibrium real interest rate since 1980, essentially all of the permanent declines in those variables according to some estimates. The model also implies that these declines were especially pronounced over the past decade or so because of demographic factors most-directly associated with the post-war baby boom and the passing of the information technology boom. Our results further suggest that real GDP growth and real interest rates will remain low in coming decades, consistent with the U.S. economy having reached a “new normal.”
The resulting report, Independent work: Choice, necessity, and the gig economy, finds that up to 162 million people in Europe and the United States—or 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population—engage in some form of independent work. While demographically diverse, independent workers largely fit into four segments (exhibit): free agents, who actively choose independent work and derive their primary income from it; casual earners, who use independent work for supplemental income and do so by choice; reluctants, who make their primary living from independent work but would prefer traditional jobs; and the financially strapped, who do supplemental independent work out of necessity.
Gross domestic product expanded at a 1.4 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Thursday in its third estimate of GDP. That was up from the 1.1 percent rate it reported last month and higher than analysts’ expectations.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 254,000 in the week ended Sept. 24, the Labor Department said Thursday.
I have just come across an International Monetary Fund working paper on income polarization in the United States that makes an important contribution to the secular stagnation debate. The authors — Ali Alichi, Kory Kantenga and Juan Solé — use standard econometric techniques to estimate the impact of declines in middle class incomes on total consumer spending. They find that polarization has reduced consumer spending by more than 3 percent or about $400 billion annually. If these findings stand up to scrutiny, they deserve to have a policy impact.
The Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index enables business leaders, government policymakers, and taxpayers to gauge how their states’ tax systems compare. While there are many ways to show how much is collected in taxes by state governments, the Index is designed to show how well states structure their tax systems, and provides a roadmap for improvement.
In November, Washington state will vote on the country’s first revenue-neutral carbon tax. By embedding the cost of carbon dioxide emissions in the price consumers and businesses pay for energy, such a tax automatically encourages conservation and makes renewable energy more appealing, without regulations and subsidies that distort investment and undercut growth. Because the revenue is used to cut other taxes, it doesn’t crimp incomes or undermine business competitiveness.
So now the question is this: when will wage growth resume its upward path? A lot of research into this question has been focused on productivity. But the Federal Reserve of New York has just released some research that points to demographics as a defining issue. They write that across the US economy, all segments of the population “display rapid real wage growth early in a worker’s career, with positive real wage growth ending when the worker is in his/her forties. This is followed by a period of either flat (high school graduates or less) to declining real wages (some college or more). By age 55, all education categories are, on average, experiencing negative real wage growth.” . . . We have shown that U.S. real wage growth has been slowing down over the past thirty-five years with the aging of our workforce. Abstracting from cyclical factors impacting the labor market, this slowing is likely to continue in the years ahead as more individuals near retirement and experience negative real wage growth… Consequently, the aging of the U.S. population will continue to act as a headwind to labor productivity and wage growth.
The temporary hike did not cause a noticeable outward flow, despite some anecdotal accounts. But Jerry Nickelsburg, who studies California’s economy for UCLA’s Anderson Forecast, suggests in a new report that making the nation’s highest marginal income tax rates at least semi-permanent could trigger flight.
In a memo to Mermell last Thursday, Finance Director Matthew Hawkesworth said he had ruled in his capacity as tax administrator that the city would tax streaming services at the same rate as cable services through a new interpretation of an existing Utility User Tax passed in 2008. . . Pasadena wouldn’t be the first local government to tax streaming services. Chicago and the state of Pennsylvania already get revenue from those types of subscriptions.
August was the biggest month ever for U.S. gasoline consumption. Americans used a staggering 9.7 million barrels per day. That’s more than a gallon per day for every U.S. man, woman and child.
But the details of the rules differ on certain provisions, including which workers and their family members are covered and how much sick time they can accrue. And that is posing problems for some businesses, especially smaller ones, that employ workers in multiple cities and states, even if they support paid sick leave. As a result, human-resources departments—and the lawyers and consultants who advise them—are scrambling to make sure they comply.
The state cannot continue to grow as fast as it has in recent years, said economists who wrote the reports, unless it funnels more people into the workplace. But there aren’t enough homes in the state to accommodate a wave of new workers.