There is growing evidence that wage differences between industries and firms are a primary source of contemporary wage inequality. Similarly, evidence suggests that gender segregation at the industry, occupation, and firm levels has persisted even as gender differences in human capital have declined. This project will draw a connection between the contribution of between-industry wage differences to overall wage inequality on the one hand, and occupational/industrial gender segregation and the wage penalty for care work on the other. The researchers will compare employment and wages, by gender, in the care versus financial sectors, thereby capturing the dynamics of gender by occupation in sectors that are the bookends in the structure of wages and wage inequality, tracking the extent to which the gender gap has grown or subsided in these two extreme groups.

This research explores how maternity leave affects mothers and their children. Much of the work on paid maternity leave in the United States has focused on the labor supply effect for women, with a small literature on health effects for children. Using a set of linked administrative data from the state of Rhode Island, this project will examine a more extensive set of outcomes for both mothers and children. In addition, the research will look at maternal and child outcomes for individuals across the income distribution, providing needed nuance to assess various policy options.

Researchers and policymakers are increasingly discovering the important role of firms when it comes to earnings. Shocks to the productivity of firms or industry—for example, a firm closing, or an industry shrinking—appear to be an important contributor to workers’ earnings and employment volatility. This project will investigate how different shocks to firms and the market are passed onto employees of that firm and, importantly, the effectiveness of U.S. social insurance programs—for example, unemployment insurance, Social Security programs, etc.—in buffering households against shocks to their incomes. Whereas most of the work on these issues to date is limited to either looking at workers independently from firms or industries, or at shocks that result in substantial displacement, the researchers will utilize IRS data that allow them to link individuals to the firms that employ them, opening a rich field of research questions that it has not previously been possible to answer. Research findings will likely provide details to help us understand where problems may be greatest, or provide new evidence on places where institutions are more successful in mitigating negative shocks.

In the past, migration was an important way Americans reacted to economic shocks. When one area was hit by a decline in labor demand, residents of the area could respond by moving to an area where demand for their labor was higher. But internal migration has been falling and may be a reason why incomes for most Americans have stagnated. In an era of low labor mobility, what determines who responds to the shock via migration? This research seeks to extend recent work that has studied the impact of the well-documented shock from increased Chinese imports on the mobility of affected workers across firms, industries, and local labor markets. The authors have access to rich census data that allows them to trace individuals over time and space, and to observe many variables that may affect the likelihood of an individual’s mobility response to the trade shock—for example, demographics, historical migration flows between locations, and presence of higher education opportunities. This project will look at the net mobility of each region, and also dig into the gross inflows and outflows to better understand the underlying mechanisms.

This project is an extension of the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color, or NASCC, a city-level analysis of wealth inequality. Previously, the research team surveyed five cities with large non-white populations with the aim of measuring household wealth at the level of detailed racial and ethnic categories. Specifically, this grant will support the second wave of the NASCC in Boston, which will be representative of subgroups of Asian households as well as the originally sampled groups from the previous wave. Findings will make an important contribution to the wealth inequality literature, going beyond the broad categories of “black” and “Hispanic” to provide more granular data on the economic situation of racial and ethnic groups in the Boston metropolitan area.

Recent research has clearly shown that the inequality of labor earnings, by itself, is not enough to explain the inequality of wealth. Utilizing a series of remarkable administrative records on the population of Norway from 1995 to 2015, where individuals are subject to both income and wealth taxation, this research seeks to fill a gap in our knowledge by addressing both our theoretical understanding of how wealth is accumulated and our empirical understanding of the distribution of wealth across individuals and households.