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Charles Schwab is emblematic. Since announcing its relocation strategy in early 2013, the company has shrunk its San Francisco headquarters to fewer than 1,300 people, a 45% decrease. Its 47-acre campus south of Denver is now Schwab’s largest office, employing almost 4,000 people. An expanded office in Austin, Texas, will be completed next year, and construction is under way on a new location near Dallas.

. . . While the finance industry has been relocating entry-level jobs since the late 1980s, today’s moves are claiming higher-paid jobs in human resources, compliance and asset management, chipping away at New York City’s middle class, said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that represents the city’s business leadership.

The technology hub of San Francisco surpassed the nation’s capital last year as the highest-earning large U.S. metropolitan area. Median household income in the San Francisco metro area in 2016 was $96,667, just ahead of the $95,843 figure for the Washington region, the Census Bureau announced Thursday. That put the California hotspot in first place among the 25 most populous metro areas, with the capital falling to the No. 2 slot. The median income for the San Francisco area, including nearby cities such as Oakland and Berkeley, has surged in recent years amid a tech-sector boom and jumped 9.2% in 2016. Incomes in the Washington area, including parts of Maryland and northern Virginia, rose a more modest 2.7% from 2015.

U.S. incomes rose and the poverty rate fell last year, according to the Census Bureau’s annual report on economic well-being. The authoritative survey showed continuing progress since the 2007-09 recession. By some measures, however, Americans haven’t returned to levels of prosperity achieved nearly two decades ago.

The gap between the median income women and men make in the U.S. narrowed significantly for the first time since the recession. Men ages 15 and older employed full-time brought in a median income of $51,640 in 2016 for year-round work, compared with the $41,554 median income women made, adjusted for inflation, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. This pushes the widely cited female-to-male earnings measure to 80.5%—or 81 cents for every dollar a man makes—up 0.9 percentage point from 79.6% in 2015. Median income for men declined in 2016 after years of sluggish or no growth, while women’s median pay increased slightly, boosting the earnings measure higher.

The Nixon episode shows, says Mr. Cogan, that entitlements have been the main cause of America’s rising national debt since the early 1970s. Mr. Trump’s pact with the Democrats is part of a pattern: “The debt ceiling has to be raised this year because elected representatives have again failed to take action to control entitlement spending.” . . . Can an entitlement expansion, once granted, ever be taken back? Mr. Cogan refuses to say “never,” but says such rescindments “occur under rather extraordinary circumstances.” He offers a remarkable example: “You might ask, ‘Who achieved the largest reduction in any entitlement in the history of the country?’ Well, surprisingly, it was FDR, a person whom we normally associate with launching the modern era of entitlements.”

Female college students aren’t more likely than male students to take bad grades as a sign they should switch their majors – unless they’re studying male-dominated STEM subjects like computer science and physics, according to a new study. Three Georgetown University researchers – economists Adriana Kugler and Olga Ukhaneva and management professor Catherine Tinsley – wrote in a recent working paper that receiving low grades in a stereotypical male discipline where men already are overrepresented may present a potent combination of disincentives for women to continue their studies in that field.

The brick-and-mortar retail swoon has been accompanied by a less headline-grabbing e-commerce boom that has created more jobs in the U.S. than traditional stores have cut. Those jobs, in turn, pay better, because its workers are so much more productive. This demonstrates something routinely overlooked in the anxiety about the job-destroying potential of robots, artificial intelligence and other forms of automation. Throughout history, automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys. The reason: Companies don’t use automation simply to produce the same thing more cheaply. Instead, they find ways to offer entirely new, improved products. As customers flock to these new offerings, companies have to hire more people.

The pace of hiring slowed in August, while the U.S. unemployment rate edged up.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 156,000 in August from the prior month, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4% from 4.3%, though the level remains historically low. Wages maintained a modest growth rate.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 179,000 new jobs and a 4.3% unemployment rate last month.

U.S. new-home sales fell sharply in July, providing fresh evidence that a shortage of housing inventory is depleting activity across all segments of the market.

Swing states that played a key role in electing Donald Trump president have posted some of the biggest declines in unemployment during the early phase of his administration. Six states voted for President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in 2012 and then Mr. Trump, a Republican, in 2016: Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The median unemployment rate of those switchover states has fallen far faster than the national median this year, according to an analysis of data released by the Labor Department on Friday. The median rate of those states stood at 3.9% as of July, down from just under 5% in December. By comparison, the national median fell to 4.1% in July from 4.7%.

Average hourly wages are growing at a slightly slower pace over the past 12 months compared with the prior year, according to the Labor Department. Median weekly earnings are growing at a better rate, but gains have been subdued since the recession ended more than eight years ago.

Typically modest wage growth would point to remaining slack in the labor market. But that’s not the case, according to updated research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

“While higher-wage baby boomers have been retiring, lower-wage workers sidelined during the recession have been taking new full-time jobs,” paper authors Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, and Benjamin Pyle wrote. “Together these two changes have held down measures of wage growth.”

Pot shops are sprouting across California after voters last year legalized marijuana for recreational use. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sowed fears on the left that the feds will try to nip California’s pot industry in the bud. The bigger threat may be parasitic lawyers.

Plaintiff firms have filed some 800 complaints against marijuana businesses alleging violations of the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (Prop. 65). The 1986 law requires businesses to post warnings if their products contain one of the more than 900 chemicals that state regulators have deemed hazardous or carcinogenic.

. . . Plaintiff attorneys eye a business opportunity in pot legalization, which is expected to grow California’s cannabis market by $5 billion. They are now raiding mom-and-pop pot shops, vaping cartridge manufacturers, edible producers and co-ops. One plaintiff has filed more than 600 Prop. 65 violation notices.

. . . a Wall Street Journal analysis of tax data in 40 counties in California—by far the biggest market for PACE loans—shows that defaults have jumped over the last year. Roughly 1,100 borrowers missed two consecutive payments in the tax year that ended June 30, compared with 245 over the previous year. That means they are in default, and could potentially have their homes auctioned off by local governments within five years.

Self-driving vehicles have the potential to reshape a wide range of occupations held by roughly one in nine American workers, according to a new U.S. government report.

About 3.8 million people drive taxis, trucks, ambulances and other vehicles for a living. An additional 11.7 million workers drive as part of their work, including personal care aides, police officers, real-estate agents and plumbers. In all, that’s roughly 11.3% of total U.S. employment based on 2015 occupational data, according to the analysis by three Commerce Department economists.

“The traditional view has been that the license is just a barrier to entry,” said Clemson University economist Peter Blair, who co-authored the paper with Clemson graduate student Bobby Chung. But, he said in an interview, licenses also provide potential employers with information about the workers who have them: Many require special training or bar people with criminal records.

The study suggests women are rewarded because a license signals training and job skills, while black men benefit when a license signals they don’t have a felony conviction.

“Licensing may not be the most efficient way to convey this information, but we need to acknowledge that licensing is providing this information,” Mr. Blair said.