Weekend reading: “not as contingent as you thought” edition

Posted on by David Evans

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.

 
Equitable Growth round-up
Earlier this week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the newest data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey which cover April. Here are four graphs using key data from JOLTS.

How many U.S. workers are in contingent jobs? How many are independent contractors? Kate Bahn set the stage for new data released these week answering just those questions.

John Williams takes the helm of the power Federal Reserve Bank of New York this month. He’s a fan of the Federal Reserve moving to a price-level target when it comes to monetary policy. Would this be a step in the right direction?

 
Links from around the web
The U.S. labor market hit a level that no one had seen in almost 50 years. Sho Chandra and Jeanna Smialek report on the ratio of unemployment to vacant jobs dropping below 1. [bloomberg]

The federal government this week released new data on contingent work and alternative work arrangements in the United States for the first time in 13 years. Despite the expectations of many that the data would show a big increase in nontraditional work, Ben Casselman writes that “you can see the gig economy everywhere but in the statistics.” [nyt]

Rising income inequality in the United States has manifested itself in many ways. One of the more prominent trends has been the decline of the middle class. Eleanor Kruase and Isabel V. Sawhill list seven reasons to worry about the middle class. [brookings]

Building off previous work, Jason Furman and Peter Orszag try to answer one of the most important questions about the U.S. economy: is slower productivity growth related to higher economic inequality? [piie]

Social scientists are coming to grips with the problem of replication as researchers have difficulty replicating the results of prior research. Anastasia Ershova and Gerald Schneider point out another wrinkle to this problem: updates of statistical software. [lse impact blog]

 
Friday figure

Figure is from “JOLTS Day Graphs: April 2018 Report Edition”

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Brad DeLong: Worthy reads on equitable growth, June 1-7, 2018

Posted on by Emilie Openchowski

Worthy reads on Equitable Growth:

  1. That monetary policy is best which avoids creating needless unemployment while still maintaining confidence in the value of the unit of account. Yet surprisingly little thought has been devoted to figuring out which monetary policy jumps the highest with respect to this objective. Nick Bunker’s “Getting on the level with the Fed’s targeting of prices” makes this point: “John Williams’s move to New York is a sign that the Federal Reserve may soon reconsider its target for monetary policy. It’s not clear whether a new target would emerge from such a process or how radical a change current members of the [Federal Open Market Committee] would consider. The current inflation targeting structure may have gotten the U.S. economy to where it is, but it took some time. A quicker recovery from the next recession would be to the benefit of everyone in the U.S. economy. So, a rethink is needed. Hopefully it’s coming soon.
  2. There was a lot of noise about how giving repatriated profits a tax break would boost investment in America. As near as I can see it, none of it was well-founded at all. Listen to what Kimberly Clausing has to say in “Equitable Growth in Conversation: Kimberly A. Clausing.” She points out in her conversation: “We are distorting repatriation decisions by having this repatriation tax. But I don’t think we’re dramatically changing the investments found in the United States. The companies that have profits abroad can borrow against them to finance any desired investment. And some of the money isn’t really truly abroad—it’s invested in U.S. assets.
  3. Read Kate Bahn’s piece over on Slate: “Education Won’t Solve Inequality:Not without workers’ power too.” And looking forward to what we can learn from this BLS initiative that Kate also highlighted earlier this week: “New data on contingent workers in the United States.” The details break on Thursday, June 7.

Worthy reads not on Equitable Growth:

  1. A very interesting study of what appears to be highly successful job search assistance in Nevada comes our way from Day Manoli, Marios Michaelides, and Ankur Patel in “Long-Term Effects of Job-Search Assistance: Experimental Evidence Using Administrative Tax Data.” They note: “Administrative tax data … examine the long-term effects of an experimental job-search assistance program operating in Nevada in 2009.”
  2. I suspect that other countries will prove much more effective at compensating the losers from a trade war than President Donald Trump will be. Paul Krugman makes the point in “Oh, What a Stupid Trade War.” Krugman writes: “My professional training wants me to dismiss the jobs question as off-base. But … we … want to know whether the Trump trade war … would add or subtract jobs holding monetary policy constant, even though we know monetary policy won’t be constant. … This trade war will actually be a job-killer. … Trump is putting tariffs on intermediate goods. … Whatever gains there are in primary metals employment will be offset by job losses in downstream industries. … Other countries will retaliate. … We’re dealing with real countries … they have pride; and their electorates really, really don’t like Trump. This means that even if their leaders might want to make concessions, their voters probably won’t allow it. … This is a remarkably stupid economic conflict to get into. And the situation in this trade war is likely to develop not necessarily to Trump’s advantage.”
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Getting on the level with the Fed’s targeting of prices

Posted on by Emilie Openchowski
Price-level targets may help prices in the economy grow at a steady pace, but might not hold up well if the U.S. economy is hit by a supply-side shock.

For a bit more than a year now, the Federal Open Market Committee—the policy committee of the Federal Reserve—has made it clear that its inflation target for the U.S. economy is “symmetric.” The central bank wants annual inflation to be at a 2 percent rate, but sometimes it misses that goal. The symmetric target means the Federal Reserve should regard inflation a bit higher than 2 percent and a bit below 2 percent equally. Given that inflation (according to the Fed’s preferred measure) has been below 2 percent for almost six years, the central bank appears to be signaling that it won’t see a slight increase in inflation higher than 2 percent as a problem.

But what if the Fed didn’t just tolerate inflation above 2 percent, but rather tried to engineer such an overshoot? After years of inflation lower than 2 percent, perhaps the central bank could try to make up for those mistakes. It’s an idea that has gained new credence recently, as a key proponent of the idea has moved into a new position of increased influence.

John Williams, most recently the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, moves across the country this month to take the same position at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The New York Fed is uniquely powerful among regional Fed banks, as it always has a vote on monetary policy (the other banks rotate in and out of voting annually) and serves as the vice chair of the FOMC. Williams is well-known for his research on the declining “natural rate of interest” and, most importantly for this discussion, his advocacy for a price-level target.

A price-level target would require the Federal Reserve to keep the price level of the U.S. economy growing at a constant rate over time. If the Fed missed on the downside by, say, letting inflation only grow at 1 percent, it would have to make up for this miss by pushing up inflation for one year. Inflation might miss the target from year to year, but over time, prices in the economy should grow at a constant rate.

How would a switch to a price-level target help policymakers? In a period of low interest rates, research, including Williams’, shows that holding interest rates lower for longer than other monetary policy frameworks would help boost the economy more. A price-level target would be a systematic way to ensure that the central bank would follow this rule. It’s a rules-based approach to monetary policy that doesn’t micromanage central bankers.

But there is a potential flaw with a price-level target—it might not hold up well if the U.S. economy is hit by a supply-side shock. Say, for example, that oil prices suddenly increase or higher tariffs are imposed that push up prices in general across the economy. Either of those increases would be a one-time increase in the price level of the economy and a temporary increase in inflation. It’s unlikely that inflation will stay elevated after either such one-time shock. But if the Federal Reserve is targeting the price level, monetary policymakers would be required to tighten monetary policy to bring down inflation to compensate for the overshoot.

Fortunately, there’s another option for a level target that wouldn’t suffer from such a problem: nominal Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, before factoring inflation. David Beckworth at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center notes that a nominal GDP level target would have the merit of having the Federal Reserve focus just on changes in aggregate demand. A temporary price-level target, as proposed by former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, might get around these concerns, but there is a possibility of supply-side shocks at the zero lower bound. Monetary policymakers need to strongly consider the probability of significant supply-side shocks to the U.S. economy in contemplating a move to a price-level target.

Of course, there’s the possibility that a shift in the Fed’s inflation target won’t change policymaker action much. Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari has argued that the main obstacle to more aggressive monetary policy is a belief in “nonlinearity,” a concern that inflation will accelerate rapidly, perhaps uncontrollably, if policy is aggressive.

Either way, Williams’ move to New York is a sign that the Federal Reserve may soon reconsider its target for monetary policy. It’s not clear whether a new target would emerge from such a process or how radical a change current members of the FOMC would consider. The current inflation targeting structure may have gotten the U.S. economy to where it is, but it took some time. A quicker recovery from the next recession would be to the benefit of everyone in the U.S. economy.

So, a rethink is needed. Hopefully it’s coming soon.

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JOLTS Day Graphs: April 2018 Report Edition

Posted on by David Evans

Every month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on hiring, firing, and other labor market flows from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, better known as JOLTS. Today, the BLS released the latest data for April 2018. This report doesn’t get as much attention as the monthly Employment Situation Report, but it contains useful information about the state of the U.S. labor market. Below are a few key graphs using data from the report.

The quits rate stayed steady at 2.3 percent in April, an indication that quitting has seemingly increased and may continue to do so.

The ratio of unemployment-to-job openings was 0.95 in April, breaking the significant barrier of 1.0. A ratio this low means there were more vacant jobs than officially unemployed workers in April.

The vacancy yield, or the job-filling rate, slightly increased. But the number of hires per job openings is historically low and the current trend is slightly downward.

The Beveridge Curve, which is supposed to indicate the unemployment rate for a given amount of job openings, has returned to its pre-recession relationship.

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New data on contingent workers in the United States

Posted on by Emilie Openchowski
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will soon release data on its Contingent Worker Supplement survey, shedding light on how different sectors of contingent and nonstandard work, including those in the gig economy and platform-based employment such as Uber, have changed in the past decade.

On Thursday, June 7, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release data from its freshly collected Contingent Worker Supplement. It’s important for policymakers and economists alike to know what to look for ahead of Thursday’s data release.

The BLS had collected this data from 1995 until 2005, when it stopped fielding the survey as part of its Current Population Survey due to funding constraints. But the increasing visibility of gig work with the onset of platform-based employment has emphasized the need to understand contingent work, which is defined by the agency as wage and salary workers who do not expect their job to last, self-employed workers, and independent contractors.

The revived Contingent Worker Supplement will reveal how different sectors of contingent and more broadly nonstandard work—of which contingent work is one type—have changed throughout the past decade. In the meantime, since 2005, mixed evidence has demonstrated the need for continual collection of data on this workforce. Economists Lawrence Katz at Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University replicated the Contingent Worker Supplement for the years 2005 to 2015 with the RAND American Life Panel. Overall, they estimate that contingent workers increased from 10.7 percent of workers in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015, with the largest increase being workers hired out through contract companies.

This finding supports the analysis done by the U.S. Department of Labor’s former Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division David Weil, now the dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, who found that the workplace is increasingly fissured, with subcontracting through a network of companies with “core competencies.” This fissuring leaves workers at the lower rungs with little room for growth. It will be important to see how much this sector of contingent work has grown since then when the BLS releases the new data on Thursday.

Then there is the data within the data on platform-based employment such as drivers for Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.—workers who loom large in the public perception even though there is mixed evidence on the exact level of employment through online application-driven gig employment. A recently published survey by the Federal Reserve Board found that 16 percent of respondents report earning money through online activities, which they note includes driving through a ride-sharing app such as Uber or selling things online through a platform such as eBay Inc. Yet having earned money online at some point does not necessarily reflect one’s typical experience in the economy.

The Katz and Krueger study replicating the Contingent Worker Survey, for example, found that only 0.5 percent of all workers were providing services through an online intermediary such as Uber. A JPMorgan Chase Institute study found that regular monthly participation in what it calls the “Online Platform Economy” grew from 0.1 percent to 1 percent of their sample from 2012 to 2015—a huge increase, but still a small proportion of the overall economy. The JPM Chase Institute research on the platform economy indicates that employment in the online gig economy is starting to plateau, with a slowdown in growth in both monthly participation and year-over-year growth in earnings. The new BLS data will help refine estimates of the size and the earnings of this small but popular sector of the workforce.

Another important sector of contingent work includes self-employed workers and independent contractors, who are asked about their employment status in the Current Population Survey, as well as in other economic surveys, but generally do not have much additional detail. These workers range from high-income entrepreneurs to gig workers hustling to patch together volatile earnings. In 2016, 6.2 percent of the workforce, or 10 million workers, reported being independent contractors as their primary job, according to calculations with the CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement. The ASEC is the only U.S. Census Bureau-fielded survey that asks detailed earnings questions for self-employed workers, but even then, self-reported earnings for independent contractors are often regarded as inaccurate due in part to the difficulty in measuring total earnings when patching different sources of income.

The Contingent Worker Supplement is one of the broadest definitions of nonstandard work, but it is just one type of nonstandard work arrangement. Others include part-time workers and on-call workers. The Government Accountability Office reported on all workers in alternative work arrangements and found that this type of employment has grown from 35 percent of the workforce in 2006 to 40 percent in 2010. Many of these arrangements have existed for a long time, but the pressure to understand them comes from the changing structure of the U.S. economy and open questions about the future of work.

The crux of the contingent-work issue is that these various types of work arrangements may be associated with economic insecurity since by definition contingent work is that which you do not expect to last. Rising economic inequality and the fissured workplace have drawn attention to the need for policies that ensure all types of workers and jobs have opportunity and security at the same time. But without reliable data on the size of this workforce and how those engaged in contingent work are faring, policymakers can neither make the case that policies are needed to cater to the unique needs of workers in alternative arrangements nor examine what types of policies may be effective for them. Thursday’s release of the topline figures from the new Contingent Worker Supplement and the subsequent microdata release will give researchers an opportunity to understand who these workers are and what conditions they face, which in turn will help shape policies that affect this segment of the labor market as it may become increasingly important in the future of work.

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Weekend reading: “barriers to economic equality” edition

Posted on by David Evans

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.

Equitable Growth round-up

Equitable Growth policy analyst Bridget Ansel gathered some of Equitable Growth’s past work analyzing the cause of the motherhood pay gap to mark the day in the year (May 30) that mothers would have to work in the United States in order to earn what fathers did in 2017.

What exactly is going on in the U.S. labor market and why is the prime employment rate not fully stationary? Is the labor market not as tight as we are made to believe? Equitable Growth analyst Nick Bunker’s column looks at the state of U.S. wage growth, why the unemployment rate is below where it was before the Great Recession, and why nominal wage growth hasn’t picked up.

Equitable Growth released its monthly Jobs Day Graphs. The graphs display data including newly employed workers who were more likely to be previously unemployed and the employment rate of prime-age workers, who still trail their pre-recession peak.

Can union organization be pivotal in the attempts to tackle economic inequality? Equitable Growth policy analyst Kate Bahn’s piece in Slate argues the power of unionization in its effects to boost wage growth.

Links from around the web

It remains unclear whether the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 will benefit employment, but what is clear is where the tax benefits are going. Reed College economist Kimberly Clausing finds that the bottom 99 percent of income earners will see an average tax cut of around 1 percent and  their taxes will ultimately rise after the benefits expire in 8 years, while the top 1 percent will continue to experience a tax cut after benefits are set to expire. (econofact)

Do economist have a responsibility to address inequality? In an interview with Samantha Eyler-Driscoll, University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman discusses the issues with excessive economic power and the issues of economists dismissing distributional economic policies. (promarket)

Do questions about previous salary history on job applications impede progress on closing the gender wage gap? Alexia Fernández Campbell lays out the argument for why this question prevents women from earning an income equal to their male counterparts and considers the recent success of states and cities that have barred the question from being asked. (vox)

Pregnancy often creates hurdles for women in the job market, in some cases even driving them out of a job. These negative implications to starting a family could be a reason why women are waiting to start families later in life or even consider putting off having a family altogether. Emily Peck discusses how starting a family can lead to punishment for women in the workplace.  (huffingtonpost)

Could America’s own exceptionalism be the reason why the rich keep getting richer? Might it be that our national disinterest in bettering the U.S. economy be why Blacks and Hispanics are being disproportionately left behind? Eduardo Porter questions why the United States lags behind its industrialized counterparts in his final column. (NYT)

Friday figure

Figure is from “Equitable Growth’s Jobs Day Graphs: May 2018 Report Edition”

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Equitable Growth’s Jobs Day Graphs: May 2018 Report Edition

Posted on by David Evans

Earlier this morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on the U.S. labor market during the month of May. Below are five graphs compiled by Equitable Growth staff highlighting important trends in the data.

While the unemployment rate declined in May, the share of prime-age workers with a job was unchanged at 79.2 percent.

Average wage growth ticked up to 2.7 percent, but this measure of wage growth has yet to accelerate like the Employment Cost Index.

While still high compared to previous cycles, the share of newly employed workers coming from outside the labor force has declined in recent months.

As the labor market continues to strengthen, the share of unemployment that is longer- term (more than 15 weeks) continues to decline.

The share of workers who are unemployed because they left a job has risen sharply over the past three months.

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Examining the links between rising wage inequality and the decline of unions

Posted on by David Evans

The correlation between unions and economic inequality is well-documented, but has the decline of unions led to increasing inequality, or can this be explained by skill-biased technical change? As Equitable Growth Economist Kate Bahn writes in a new column for Slate, new research published via the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that “while education and skills training matter to worker productivity, they’re not sufficient to ensure economic security without workers’ power to bargain for better wages too.”

Princeton University economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, and Ilyana Kuziemko, and Columbia University economist and Equitable Growth grantee Suresh Naidu used survey data compiled from a variety of historical sources to explore rising and declining union density throughout the 20th century. What they found was that increasing returns to education do not adequately explain inequality, but the decline of union density does.

Says Bahn in her column in Slate: “Promoting education as the tool to overcoming economic inequality is convenient because it puts the onus on individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and doesn’t call into question structures and barriers that limit economic opportunity.” She adds that “providing opportunity to American families will require a robust labor movement that balances corporate power and pushes back against the wage stagnation affecting most workers.”

Read the full column on Slate: “Education Won’t Solve Inequality.”

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Brad DeLong: Worthy reads on equitable growth, May 25-31, 2018

Posted on by Emilie Openchowski

Worthy reads on Equitable Growth:

  1. Nick Bunker gathers scattered threads and sets out the issues on wage growth and unemployment in “Puzzling over U.S. wage growth.”
  2. As I say in a Value Added blog post, exactly the kind of debate we should be hosting and encouraging is by Jesse Rothstein: “Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income.” In the paper, he writes that “Chetty et al. (2014b) show that children from low-income families achieve higher adult incomes … in some commuting zones (CZs) than in others.”
  3. Michael Kades, in “Unlocking Antitrust Enforcement: New Yale symposium examines proposals to make antitrust enforcement more effective,” highlights the papers from our co-hosted antitrust symposium in October 2017.
  4. From two years ago, here is a minimum wage meta-analysis well worth re-reading: Arindrajit Dube and Ben Zipperer: “Pooling multiple case studies using synthetic controls: An application to minimum wage policies.”
  5. Also worth reading from this past October is Darrick Hamilton’s “Post-racial rhetoric, racial health disparities, and health disparity consequences of stigma, stress, and racism.”

Worthy reads not on Equitable Growth:

  1. I am confused here: Do we have an “eastern heartland” problem? Or do we have a “prime-age male joblessness” problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. Read the column by Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers, and Ben Austin, “A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland.” They write: “The Eastern Heartland[‘s] … relative G.D.P. would have been more than 50 percent higher had it grown at the rate of America’s Coastal states. The earned-income tax credit has been effectively promoting employment for over 40 years, but its design makes it poorly suited to fighting the ocean of male joblessness.”
  2. Arithmetically, the big increases in price inflation in the 1970s came from the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and the productivity growth slowdown. Milton Friedman tried to claim that those were both the result of too-rapid money growth permitted by the Fed, but was never convincing. Yet the folk memory of the 1970s is that the big increases in price inflation in the 1970s came from too-rapid money growth permitted by the Fed that pushed the unemployment rate well below the NAIRU. Simply not true. Read “Noah Smith: Don’t Raise Rates Just to Keep Wages in Check.” He writes: “Policy makers and macroeconomic analysts should rethink the basic mental model that they use to evaluate the state of the economy. … Rising wages don’t seem to trigger a wage-price spiral … not at moderate levels of wage growth. … If those experts keep relying on the conventional wisdom imparted from the 1970s and 1980s, big mistakes could result.”
  3. In “The Stickiness of the Medicaid Expansion,” Scott Lemieux writes that “Good Democratic policy that provides important benefits to people may not benefit the Democratic Party, and in Arkansas it hasn’t at either the state or federal level. But the policies themselves tend to be sticky, and that’s important in itself! And while universal programs in some cases are more desirable on policy grounds, it’s simply not true that programs that predominantly help the non-affluent are never popular or robust.”
  4. In “How Neoliberalism Changed the World,” Patrick Iber writes that “Neoliberalism often connotes a form of liberal politics that has embraced market-based solutions to social problems. … The [interwar Austrian] neoliberals sought, Slobodian writes, to ‘encase’ markets … a global system that sufficiently ordered the world so that capitalism would be safe from certain forms of political interference. … The things that neoliberalism has trouble seeing are, at the present, far more consequential: deep inequalities, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of being left behind by a global system that operates with no regard for the interests or voice of the majority.”
  5. Ernie Tedeschi, in “Will Employment Keep Growing? Disabled Workers Offer a Clue,” says that “A seemingly inexorable economic trend has changed direction in the past few years, as people who cited health reasons for not working are returning to the labor force.”
  6. Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark note in “Stabilising the real economy increases average output,” that “DeLong and Summers (1989) … argue that (demand) stabilisation policies can affect the mean level of output and unemployment.”
  7. Noah Smith says in “The Rich Get the Most Out of College” that “the college earnings premium—the lifetime difference in earnings between those who get a bachelor’s degree and those who only finish high school—was substantial for people from all income backgrounds.”
  8. It seems to me more likely than not that the Federal Reserve’s current fear of a high-pressure economy is based on a misreading of a historical experience now a generation and a half past. Neel Kashkari, in “The Fed should not move too quickly to raise rates,” says that “The US recovery took place after the Federal Reserve undertook extraordinary monetary policies.”
  9. Adam Tooze asks: “Do you think Italian bond markets maybe had been dozing a bit?” He says “It’s politics sure, but sovereign debt markets ARE political.”
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A look at the motherhood wage gap on Mother’s Equal Pay Day

Posted on by David Evans

Today is Mother’s Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into the year mothers in the United States have to work to earn what fathers earned in 2017. Equitable Growth writes a lot about this topic, and today we take a look back at some of our work analyzing the cause of the motherhood pay gap in the United States and abroad and the research on solutions that help mothers and families balance caregiving responsibilities with paid employment.

“Mothers in the United States earn less despite education and experience.” New research finds that the motherhood wage gap has remained the same over the past 30 years, and has actually gotten worse for some mothers.

“Gender wage inequality: What we know and how we can fix it.” Equitable Growth’s recent report details the drivers of U.S. wage inequality for mothers and childless women alike and lays out steps that can be taken at the state and federal level to address it.

“After 25 years, it’s time for paid leave.” Twenty-five years ago, President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, providing most workers the job-protected right to take unpaid time off from work to care for a new child. This column looks at why it’s time to update the law to include paid leave.

“Can women’s “sagging middle” help explain the fall in U.S. labor force participation rates?” Labor force participation rates have been falling since 2000, and women dropping out of the workforce is playing a role. Research shows that, following the birth of a child, women’s labor force participation is lower today than in the past.

“Has the momentum around paid leave reached a tipping point in the United States?” Existing state policies show that paid family leave based on a social insurance model can provide a critical benefit for everyone in the U.S. workforce.

“Across developed countries, family policies help women.” Research examining whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship between family policies and women’s employment outcomes in western countries finds that spending on childcare and early child learning results in higher rates of women’s employment and a reduction in the gender wage gap.

“Is the cost of childcare driving women out of the U.S. workforce?” Research finds that rising childcare expenditures in the United States results in an estimated five percent decline in total employment of women and a 13 percent decline in the employment of working mothers with children under the age of 5.

“All work and no pay for women around the globe.” A young women entering the job market today can expect to work on average four more years than their male counterpart due to women’s disproportionate share of unpaid and domestic duties.

“Working mothers with infants and toddlers and the importance of family economic security.” Mothers with young children have played a crucial role in keeping their families afloat financially in the United States, elevating the need for policies that address work-family conflict.

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