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 December 2020. 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 increased slightly to 2.3 percent in December, with larger increases to the quits rate in leisure & hospitality and education & health services.
Job openings were little changed but hires decreased in December, leading to a decline in the job vacancy yield.
With little change to unemployment and openings in December, the ratio of unemployed workers remained stable, although at an an elevated level compared to before the pandemic.
The Beveridge Curve has made little movement in the past three months, but remains in an atypical range during the pandemic-induced recession.
1. Ultimately—no, not ultimately, but rather immediately—whose property the law will protect is a political decision made in the interests of those whom the government listens to, in the triple senses of protecting it from theft or expropriation, protecting it from damage, and protecting it from devaluation. If you don’t have a political voice, whatever property you do accumulate is likely to be evanescent and to be worth little. Read David Mitchell, Austin Clemens, and Shanteal Lake, “The consequences of political inequality and voter suppression for U.S. economic inequality and growth,” in which they write: “Those who enjoy market power are, not coincidentally, often the same citizens who enjoy outsized political influence, creating a feedback loop that perpetuates economic inequality, instability, and slow growth. This report examines cutting-edge research on how economic and racial inequality interact around the country among those Americans who vote, those who try to vote but face obstacles in doing so, and those who do not vote altogether. The evidence-based research we explore pinpoints the myriad ways that economic and racial inequality together subvert our democracy by aiding and abetting political inequality and voter suppression.”
2. After a very, very rocky initial start, the augmented Unemployment Insurance benefits system in the United States has, in many states, worked very well during the coronavirus recession. Without it the economic disaster, and likely the pandemic disaster, would have been significantly worse. I remain puzzled about the form unemployment has taken over the past year. Why are initial claims still so large? Exactly who and why is being fired in such large numbers right now? Check out Equitable Growth’s Unemployment Insurance graphics, “For the week ending January 30.”
Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:
1. The data underlying this observation from Noah Smith are the reason that I have considerable sympathy for the “mismeasurement” theories about the growth of total factor productivity since 1973. I do not know about you, but the nondurables and services that I consume are substantially transformed from those I consumed back in 1973 in a very good quality- and sophistication-adjusted way. There is no comparison between TV dinners now and TV dinners then, between home-produced coffee now and home-produced coffee then, between information and entertainment technologies now and information and entertainment technologies then. What picture of the changing shape of technology can we hold in our minds’ eyes that generates extraordinary technological advances in the production of durables, extraordinary quality augmentation in the commodities we consume, extraordinary transformation of our information and information-related technologies, and yet non-durable and service TFP stagnation? My first reaction is: there is none—the process of producing durables overlaps a lot with the process of producing nondurables and services. The difference is that with durables we can better measure quality changes because the old versions hang around for generations with market valuations attached. Now I am not sure that this position is right. And certainly the consensus of those who study these issues carefully and are not fascinated by technology is otherwise. But it does make me wonder. Read Noah Smith, “About that TFP stagnation,” I which he writes: “Wow! If you look only at the durables sector, there was no Great Stagnation at all … Durables TFP has been growing more strongly post–1993 than it ever did in the post-WWII boom! Consider this: In the 26 years from ’47 to ’73, durables TFP nearly doubled, but in the 15 years from ’94-’09, durables TFP more than doubled … Something big did happen to technological progress … not in 1973 … but a decade earlier. In the 15 years to 1963, the two sectors progressed pretty much in tandem. But sometime in the early- to mid–60s, they diverged wildly, with nondurables [and services] TFP rising anemically through the late 70s and then basically flatlining until now … I think we should look at the “Great Stagnation” as a more subtle phenomenon than simply the exhaustion of the “low-hanging fruit” of nature. Our technologies for producing durable goods are improving faster than ever.”
2. I think that this is 100 percent correct. There is now effectively zero net cost to moving to net-zero CO2 emissions in the United States over the next generation. And we could—and should—do it more rapidly and incur some costs. The benefits to the world will be greatly worth it. Read James H. Williams and his co-authors, “Carbon‐Neutral Pathways for the United States,” in which they write: “Modeling the entire U.S. energy and industrial system … we created multiple pathways to net zero and net negative CO2 emissions by 2050. They met all forecast U.S. energy needs at a net cost of 0.2–1.2 percent of GDP in 2050, using only commercial or near‐commercial technologies, and requiring no early retirement of existing infrastructure. Pathways with constraints on consumer behavior, land use, biomass use, and technology choices (e.g., no nuclear) met the target but at higher cost. All pathways employed four basic strategies: energy efficiency, decarbonized electricity, electrification, and carbon capture … In the next decade, the actions required in all pathways were similar: expand renewable capacity 3.5 fold, retire coal, maintain existing gas generating capacity, and increase electric vehicle and heat pump sales to >50% of market share. This study provides a playbook for carbon neutrality policy with concrete near‐term priorities.”
This is a post we publish each Friday 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 relevant and interesting articles 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
Economic power and political power are intertwined in the U.S. system, as those with market power tend to also wield outsized political power. This relationship between the U.S. economy and U.S. democracy creates a feedback loop that perpetuates economic inequality, instability, and stagnating growth, write David Mitchell, Austin Clemens, and Shanteal Lake in a new report for Equitable Growth. The report looks at the consequences of recent electoral trends in the United States—including underinvestment in electoral infrastructure, the unbalanced campaign finance system, and heightened voter suppression tactics—on voter turnout and representation in the federal government. They examine the many ways in which economic and racial inequality affects who votes, who faces challenges when trying to vote, and who doesn’t vote at all, with repercussions on the populations, policies, and issues that elected officials represent and fight for while in office. They then make several recommendations for policymakers to address the cycle of unequal political power and economic and racial inequality, and to ensure broadly shared and sustainable growth. In an accompanying column to the report, the authors summarize their research and explain why fighting voter suppression would bridge the economic divide between Black and White Americans while kickstarting the U.S. economy.
The “skills gap” narrative, which says that wages will increase when workers acquire more skills or credentials, is false and harmful, and may further entrench vast racial income divides across the U.S. workforce. In fact, Kate Bahn and Kathryn Zickuhr write, even as educational attainment increased for all racial and ethnic groups in the United States in recent decades, the wage divide has worsened between Black and White workers, particularly at higher levels of education, while student debt among Black college graduates remains higher than that of White students for years following graduation. Bahn and Zickuhr review a recent working paper that looks into the link between education level and actual required job skills in order to show how credentialism fosters inequality and reduces upward income mobility. While the vast majority of new jobs posted and filled in recent years required a bachelor’s degree, the skills actually needed in many jobs—in software and technology, for instance—are learned by experience and training rather than formal education. Loosening education requirements may aid in job matching, the working paper’s authors argue, and Bahn and Zickuhr recommend raising wages and improving job quality across the board to reduce inequality and drive growth.
Every month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on the U.S. labor market, and today, it released data for the month of January, in which prime age employment increased only slightly, reflecting a weak economic recovery. Bahn and Carmen Sanchez Cumming put together five graphs highlighting important trends in the data, including in the continued racial disparities in unemployment rates and recovery, as well as a still-declining leisure and hospitality sector. And accompanying Jobs Day column by Bahn and Carmen delves into some of the details evident in the newly released data.
In late 2020, Equitable Growth hosted a virtual event highlighting policy ideas for strengthening antitrust enforcement that were put forth in a report authored by seven academic antitrust and competition policy experts. Raksha Kopparamsummarizes the report’s main ideas and policy proposals, while reporting on the event’s debate and discussion among participants.
Canceling all federal student debt can be done via executive action and would not only help all borrowers but would also begin to close the racial wealth divide in the United States.In an op-ed for The New York Times, Naomi Zewde and Darrick Hamilton explain how this policy idea would have a profound impact on the discriminatory burden of student loan debt for Black Americans. Zewde and Hamilton describe the long history of policies that discriminate against borrowers of color, especially Black borrowers, that has fostered the enormous Black-White wealth divide in the United States. Less household wealth, they write, means taking on more debt to pay for college, which gets compounded when Black workers earn less than their White counterparts upon graduating and entering the labor force. President Joe Biden can use executive authority to cancel all federal student loan debt—and in the absence of full cancellation, Zewde and Hamilton contend, the push to cancel $50,000 of debt per borrower would be a step in the right direction.
The benefits of raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour would outweigh the costs of doing so, writesThe Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey. Though the longstanding theory is that doing so would harm small businesses, raise prices on goods and services, and lead to rising unemployment, evidence suggests that these predictions are overblown. Recent research debunks the claim that higher wages lead to lower employment, with studies of U.S. cities and states, as well as other countries, that have raised the minimum wage finding no evidence of major job losses. As for the idea that “mom and pop” shops would go out of business, Lowrey explains that there are many tried-and-tested creative options these companies can use to adapt to a higher minimum wage. And, countering the idea that raising the minimum wage would cause inflation, Lowrey shows that the price increases from higher labor costs tend to be marginal. Rather than raising overblown and disproven potential costs of raising the minimum wage, she concludes, we should focus on the myriad proven benefits that would be seen and shared across the U.S. economy.
The coronavirus recession is disproportionately affecting working women. U.S. women have lost more than 30 years of gains in the labor market in the months since the virus began closing schools and child care facilities and causing overall employment to drop. And, while solutions to this crisis are complicated, writeFortune’s Maria Aspan and Emma Hinchliffe, the private sector and policymakers alike must act quickly and broadly to address and reverse the scarring that women workers face. Aspan and Hinchliffe run through the various proposals that would help working women amid the coronavirus crisis, including ideas in President Biden’s coronavirus relief package, wage hikes for caregivers, and increased funding for nutrition and housing assistance. Enforcement of existing policies, such as antidiscrimination and overtime regulations, would also support working women, especially Black women and Latina workers, as would increasing funding for state and local governments, where women and workers of color are overrepresented. Finally, Aspan and Hinchliffe explain, ramping up vaccinations to end the pandemic and jumpstart the recovery is key to solving many of these issues and getting people back to work.
Taxis line up outside of Union Station in Washington, D.C., June 2019.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released its Employment Situation Summary for the month of January, showing that the labor market’s path toward a recovery lost steam over the past few months. In December, the U.S. economy shed 227,000 jobs, breaking a seven-month streak of net job gains. In January, less than 50,000 jobs were added, making December and January the worst months for employment since April, when more than 20 million workers lost their jobs.
At 9.2 percent, the unemployment rate for Black workers fell 0.7 percentage points between mid-December and mid-January, but continues to stand above the jobless rate of any other major racial or ethnic group. The unemployment rate for Asian American workers was the one to increase between December and January, jumping from 5.9 percent to 6.6 percent. The jobless rate for Latinx workers stands at 8.6 percent and for White workers at 5.7 percent. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1
The Jobs report also sheds light on workers’ experience by race, gender, and ethnicity. For workers 20-years-old and over, Latina’s and Black women’s employment shrunk the most between January of 2020 and January of 2021, and Latina workers experienced a massive 22 percent drop in employment between January and April of last year. After almost a quarter of a million Latino workers lost their jobs between November and December, last month they won back 116,000 jobs. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2
The leisure and hospitality industry lost almost half a million jobs in December and the sector continued to shrink last month, losing 60,000 jobs in January. Employment in the sector is down 23 percent relative to its January 2020 levels. Within leisure and hospitality, the arts, entertainment, and recreation subsector experienced an even deeper 32 percent decline in employment. Amid the continuing coronavirus recession, workers in low-wage service-providing jobs are experiencing especially tough economic outcomes, raising questions about the labor market dynamics that have put these workers in a particularly fragile position to withstand this shock. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3
In addition to being more likely to experience unemployment, income losses, and be at greater risk of getting sick, the prevalence of tipped work in low-wage service industries exposes workers to a two-tiered system where employers are required to pay a federal tipped minimum wage of only $2.13 per hour. The Fair Labor Standards Act establishes that if a workers’ tips and wages do not add up to at least $7.25 per hour—the federal wage floor—their employers must cover the difference. In practice, however, it is common for tipped workers to earn less than the minimum wage as well as to not get paid overtime for additional hours of work.
A 2010–2012 study by the U.S. Department of Labor investigating almost 9,000 restaurants found that almost 84 percent participated in at least one type of wage and hour violation. And, alarmingly, research on the Great Recession of 2007–2009 found that wage violations became more prevalent as unemployment increased, with the probability of experiencing wage theft being highest for non-U.S. citizens, Latinx workers, Black workers, and women workers.
Both as a result of labor law violations and because many tipped occupations are among the lowest paid in the United States, tipped workers—among them bartenders, hair stylists, taxi drivers, and food servers—are twice as likely as their non-tipped counterparts to experience poverty. In addition, because women and workers of color are overrepresented in many of the occupations with the largest number of workers earning wages at or below the federal minimum, tipped work also entrenches pay disparities.
Occupational and industrial sorting by race, gender, and ethnicity explains an important chunk of the disparate effects the coronavirus recession has had on different groups. For instance, workers holding jobs that require in-person interactions face a higher risk of unemployment. Yet, research also finds that job segregation does not tell the full story. Case in point, a recent study finds that even when accounting for factors such as industry and occupation effects, age, geographic region, and education, women workers and workers of color were more likely than White men to lose their jobs, with Black and Latina women facing the greatest risk of becoming unemployed as the coronavirus recession hammered the U.S. labor market between March and April.
In addition, disparities in job displacement are neither a new development nor a phenomenon that only occurs during downturns. Research found that at least since the early 1980s, Black workers have been more likely than their White counterparts to involuntarily lose their jobs—a disparity that has increased since the 1990s.
Almost a year since the onset of the coronavirus recession, the U.S. economy is down almost 10million jobs with respect to February 2020. As the crisis continues to exacerbate and shed light on long-standing inequities in the U.S. labor market, policymakers should ensure that workers in precarious industries, particularly workers from historically marginalized groups who have been sorted into low-wage occupations, can access the social safety net. This includes tipped workers being assured access to Unemployment Insurance benefits, ramping up labor law enforcement efforts to prevent wage theft, and making sure that minimum earnings requirements do not keep benefits from some of the workers who need them the most.
On February 5th, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on the U.S. labor market during the month of January. Below are five graphs compiled by Equitable Growth staff highlighting important trends in the data.
The prime-age employment-to-population ratio increased only slightly to 76.4 percent in January, reflecting a slowdown of the pace of employment recovery since late fall
Unemployment declined for Black, Hispanic and White workers, but remains higher for Black and Hispanic workers, and unemployment increased for Asian American workers, reflecting persistent disparities in unemployment by race.
After a steep decline in December, the leisure and hospitality sector continued to decline in January. Employment growth in all industries remains below pre-pandemic levels as the recession continues.
As the recession continues, a higher proportion of unemployed U.S. workers face long-term unemployment.
Public-sector employment added a small amount of jobs in January, but remains significantly below pre-pandemic levels and risks further decline in absence of fiscal relief.
The coronavirus recession continues to severely impact Black and Latinx workers, who are disproportionally suffering, compared to other workers in the United States. These more marginalized workers are registering higher rates of unemployment and lower rates of Unemployment Insurance recipiency. Black and Latinx workers also are reporting a higher proportion of lost income since March and are facing more difficulties paying weekly expenses.
This outsized impact of the coronavirus recession on Black and Latinx workers threatens to reentrench racial and ethnic wage divides in the U.S. workforce, particularly because downward pressure on wages for the most severely impacted groups of workers will continue while unemployment remains elevated. Understanding the causes of these disparate impacts is critical to designing policies that leverage political will to reduce longstanding systemic racism.
The harm caused by the false ‘skills gap’ narrative
One dominant false narrative that continues to dominate policy discussions is the so-called skills gap—a largely unfounded explanation for the present wage divide in the U.S. economy that poses a serious risk to the efficacy of relief and stimulus policy proposals. This false narrative is based on the correlation between technological advancement, the skill levels of workers needed to translate those advancements into increased productivity, and rising income inequality.
To be sure, at one time, the skills gap was a “stylized fact,” economic parlance for a generally accepted explanation of a larger part of specific wage trends. From 1980 to 2000, there was an economywide correlation between schooling and wages, which upheld the “skill-biased technical change” theory and informed policy priorities for the labor market. But this empirical relationship broke down between 2000 and 2017. Yet the skills gap narrative still undergirds policy proposals, placing the onus on workers for stagnating wages despite evidence on the relationship between declining worker power and income inequality.
In particular, promoting the skills gap in policy encourages Black and Latinx people to use their own minimal resources to invest in education and workforce development, disproportionately taking on debt to do so, without any guarantee that it will translate into higher wages and better job quality. These policies do not account for the historical wealth disparities fostered by systemic racism that crushed the ability of Black and Latinx families to build their own wealth over generations.
Despite this glaring wealth handicap, educational attainment increased across all racial and ethnic groups over the past 20 years. Yet the wage divide between Black and White workers worsened over the same time period. Indeed, the racial wage gap is greater at higher levels of education. At the same time, Black college graduates owe more student debt at graduation, and these differences in debt grow over the following years.
Similarly, wage inequality is persistent for Latinx workers, compared to White workers. When comparing Latina workers to White men workers, a larger portion of the wage gap is unexplained, or interpreted as the result of pay discrimination, compared to the gender wage divide between all women and all men. Latinx families also have lower levels of wealth, compared to White families, and this wealth gap persists even when accounting for factors such as education and income level and has widened since the Great Recession of 2007–2009.
The false promise of ‘credentialism’
Then, there is the largely misplaced focus of bridging the wage divide via a narrow definition of skills through “credentialism,” the theory that workers can improve their job prospects by earning, for example, a bachelor’s degree. Credentialism often obscures the skills and familiarity with certain tasks that workers already bring to their jobs and ultimately constrains the mobility of workers with the skills but without the traditional signals, such as workers without a bachelor’s degree.
A recent working paper details the skills acquired by workers without these signal credentials. “Searching for STARS: Work experience as a job market signal for workers without bachelor’s degrees” is by Byron Auguste, Papia Debroy, and Shah Ahmeh of Opportunity@Work, along with Peter Q. Blair of Harvard University, Tomas Castagino of Accenture Research, Erica Groshen of Cornell University, and Fernando Garcia Diaz and Cristian Bonavida of Accenture Research. They examine the link between narrowly defined education levels and actual job skills to unpack how credentialism contributes to rising wage inequality and job polarization.
Using the O*NET dataset on skills profiles of occupations, the authors develop a skills vector for occupations and measure the “distance” between occupations based on the skills makeup of each occupation. This allows them to reasonably estimate how skills in one occupation could translate into those needed for other occupations, and how this correlates with earnings levels within occupations and the potential for upward income mobility if workers are able to use the skills from their work history to match into higher-paid jobs.
In their paper, they use the example of the brickmasters, blockmasons, and stonemasons occupations and welding, soldering, and brazing occupations, both of which are among some of the most similar occupations within their schema. They find that the metalworking jobs pay nearly twice as much as the stone-working ones. The authors suggest this disparity demonstrates incomplete information about skills applicability across occupations in the labor market and may provide a tool for improving pathways for nonbachelor’s-degree workers.
An important race- and gender-based finding of the “Searching for STARS” working paper is that upward job mobility for nonbachelor’s-degree workers is also correlated with race and gender beyond what can be explained by variation in skills between different occupations within their vector schema. Higher-earning nonbachelor’s-degree workers are disproportionately White men, and those in low-wage occupations are disproportionately women of color. The authors note the “social, historical, and market factors that drive pay bands for some professions,” as this occupational segregation by race, ethnicity, and gender and the low minimum wage further compound the wage inequities that Black and Latinx workers experience and prevent them from matching into higher-paying jobs.
How to correct the wage divides in the U.S. economy
The way in which these researchers developed their schema and disseminated their findings is a first step toward ensuring all workers are able to match into jobs well-suited to their skills and allowing for upward income mobility. The second step in their paper suggests that posted job requirements, especially for jobs in newer occupations, may also reflect employer beliefs and practices that do not track with the actual skill requirements of those jobs, which can lead to the higher demand for college degrees. For instance, they find that only 42 percent of workers ages 25 to 34 have at least a 4-year college degree, yet 74 percent of new jobs from 2007 to 2016 were in occupations where employers typically require a 4-year degree.
The authors note that many of these new jobs are in occupations, such as enterprise software application developers and administrators, where college degrees are often required but the skills needed for the job are often learned through experience and targeted training. Indeed, one of the challenges to upward wage mobility that the paper identifies is employers’ “rational ignorance” about the skills of nondegree holders, which contributes to the practice of requiring academic degrees for many of these new jobs.
Instead of requiring large shares of the workforce to complete formal education programs that are not necessary for developing the skills on a job, the authors suggest that “in practice, relaxing many current occupational education requirements for a college degree may be another, preferable way to match demand with supply over the coming decade.”
In addition, the findings and analysis in the “Searching for STARS” working paper highlight the importance of raising job quality and wages for all workers. This is necessary both to reduce economic inequality and drive more equitable growth because many jobs with lower wages do not reflect their level of skills or broader contributions to society. For instance, child care workers in New York state with average hourly wages of $10.29 might be able to increase their earnings in a higher-paying job with an overlapping skill set, such as a customer service representative ($30.53/hour) or bartender ($38.13/hour), but this highlights the need to raise wages and improve job quality for child care workers, who are essential to building a robust and high-quality early care and education system.
The main conclusion of “Searching for STARS” working paper is that increasing college attendance is not a silver bullet for addressing years of job polarization and wage stagnation. Furthermore, other research demonstrates that it is not the skills gap that is the primary cause of wage inequality over time. Many workers already have skills applicable to a variety of occupations but face constraints matching into those jobs. This mismatch is due both to imperfect information in the labor market, as well as barriers that workers face when searching for work. This is particularly the case for Black and Latinx workers because of persistent hiring discrimination along the lines of race and ethnicity.
The STARS vector is a useful tool for addressing the gaps in U.S. labor market information that lead to lower wages for workers without a college degree. But its success would require a way to both signal this information to employers and ensure that employers use this information in hiring decisions, while also addressing deeper systemic barriers such as hiring discrimination. To ensure that skilled, productive, socially beneficial jobs are well-remunerated also requires increasing worker power so that workers can bargain for and command earnings that reflect the value they bring to the U.S. economy and society.
Economic analysis that does not account for political power—who has it and how it is wielded—will inevitably fail to fully capture what keeps the United States from achieving equitable economic growth. The dominant fault line in that battle for political power across the country historically and today is race. And at the center of that fault line are Black Americans, the vast majority of whom are the descendants of those who emerged from enslavement in the 19th century only to face vicious and direct voter suppression until the late 1960s—followed by indirect but still effective tactics to suppress their votes up through the 2020 elections.
Our new report, titled “The consequences of political inequality and voter suppression for U.S. economic inequality and growth,” demonstrates the clear links between access to the ballot box for Black Americans and economic well-being. These economic links are evident in the enduring and deep divides today between Black and White Americans in terms of income and wealth, as well as access to good healthcare and child care, equal education and housing, and criminal justice and environmental safety.
But first, the history—important not least because this week marks the beginning of Black History Month. While de jure racial discrimination at the polls is no longer tolerated—thanks, in part, to the 1965 Voting Rights Act—de facto discrimination, including facially neutral policies with disparate racial impacts, remain rampant. Take, for example, the widespread practice of states disenfranchising convicted felons. Only two states—Vermont and Maine, both with largely White populations—never take away felons’ right to vote, even while they are incarcerated. In the other 48 states, felons are subject to at least some voting restrictions, which have a profoundly disproportionate impact on Black Americans, who are targeted by the biased enforcement of drug laws and the country’s racist criminal justice system.
Black Americans are regular victims of overzealous and partisan purges of voter rolls, too. In Georgia, for example, a conservative estimate finds 198,351 voters were wrongfully deleted from the state’s voter rolls in a series of purges leading up to the 2018 elections, disproportionately disenfranchising young voters and voters of color on the erroneous grounds that they had moved residences.
How polling places are resourced and where they are located also have clear racial ramifications. According to an analysis by The Guardian, a new policy in Texas that allowed for widespread closure of polling locations disproportionately reduced access for Black and Latinx communities.
These examples just scratch the surface. Even if policymakers were to ignore the most egregious cases of targeted voter suppression, the universally applied bureaucratic barriers that make voting in the United States harder than in most other developed nations disproportionately disenfranchise Black Americans. Those barriers include a byzantine registration process and Election Day being held on a weekday during limited hours, both of which interact negatively with Black Americans—and low-income Americans of all races—who are less likely to have paid time off from work, are more transient in their place of residence, and are less likely to have stable transportation and child care arrangements.
All of these economic barriers to voting are due to the ingrained structural racism in all U.S. laws, policies, and institutions, not just those related to voting, including discrimination and stratification in the labor market. Yet despite all these voter suppression barriers, turnout among Black Americans is relatively high, though it still often trails that of White Americans. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1
As Figure 1 shows, the voting divide between White and Black Americans used to be wider. The aforementioned Voting Rights Act of 1965 cracked down on the worst abuses in the South, including poll taxes and literacy tests. In addition to boosting turnout among Black Americans almost overnight, the law presented a golden research opportunity, offering what academics call a “natural experiment” that can be exploited to test various hypotheses.
One such hypothesis is the claim we referenced earlier: that political inequality at the polls directly translates into economic inequality. This argument makes intuitive sense—to get reelected, politicians must be responsive to their voters’ preferences, and as the electorate gets more racially and economically diverse, politicians will pursue policies that deliver broader economic well-being. Yet it is hard to prove. In a democratic republic, it can be difficult to draw a straight line from voting behavior to policymaking, given the large number of mediating factors, from lobbyist strangleholds to gerrymandered districts.
But a number of recent papers looking at the Voting Rights Act help untangle this morass, making clear that expanding Black Americans’ political power indeed results in stronger economic standing as well. Giovanni Facchini and Cecilia Testa at the University of Nottingham and Brian Knight at Brown University find that the Voting Rights Act reduced the rate of Black arrests in jurisdictions where the chief law enforcement officer is elected, not appointed. The authors conclude that when Black Americans have the ability to vote for their sheriff, they are more likely to receive improved treatment by the criminal justice system—an important factor in shaping labor market outcomes.
Similarly, economists Elisabeth Cascio at Dartmouth College and Ebonya Washington at Yale University find that Southern counties with higher shares of Black Americans as residents experienced greater increases in both voter turnout and state investments in institutions and government programs important to Black citizens, compared to otherwise-similar counties, in the 20 years after the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests.
Abhay Aneja, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and finance professor Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León at Indiana University Bloomington (both Equitable Growth grantees) find that counties where voting rights were more strongly protected under the Voting Rights Act experienced larger reductions in the wage divide among Black workers and White workers between 1950 and 1980. The main reason seems to have been expanded access to public-sector jobs—jobs that White politicians had previously doled out almost exclusively to their White constituents without fear of electoral retribution. Other potential explanations for the result include fiscal redistribution, affirmative action, and anti-discrimination laws.
Of course, the opposite can also be true. As voter suppression tactics succeed in blocking access to the polls, economic inequality worsens. In a follow-up piece to their earlier study, Aneja and Avenancio-León found that the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, whicheffectively nullified major parts of the Voting Rights Act—and which was quickly followed by a resurgence in race-based voter suppression—exacerbated the wage divide between Black and White workers. A historical paper looking at Black disenfranchisement during the Jim Crow era of enforced segregation found that voting restrictions resulted in reduced teacher-child ratios in Black schools and lower wages for Black workers, in part because politicians had no incentive to make productive investments in Black communities.
These studies help give lie to the assertion, often espoused by “free-market” adherents, that economics is a naturally occurring phenomenon and that government can do little to address the growing threat of income and wealth inequality. In truth, those with political power determine the rules governing the U.S. economy, which means racial inequality in the nation’s electoral system is itself a major source of the enduring racial income and wealth divides. And as other researchers demonstrate, racial economic inequality can obstruct the supply of talent and slow innovation, hurting overall U.S. economic growth.
Like so many other American institutions throughout the nation’s history, the U.S. electoral system is continually subverted by those in power to perpetuate racial inequality, deepening both economic and democratic injustice. But unequal access to the polls, and the economic disparities that follow, are not immutable laws of our democracy. Tireless activism and a diversifying electorate paved the way, for example, for the 2021 election of Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator, Rev. Raphael Warnock.
But there are a number of evidence-backed steps policymakers can take to crack down on race-based voter suppression tactics that Black and low-income Americans still have to overcome. These solutions include reinstating the Voting Rights Act, making voter registration automatic, ending the disenfranchisement of former felons, and turning Election Day into a federal holiday. Many of these proposals and more were recently proposed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the pro-democracy For the People Act.
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth late last year held an event, titled “Restoring Competition in the United States: A Vision of Antitrust Enforcement for the Next Decade,” to discuss its new antitrust transition report. The report is the work of seven academic experts with deep policy experience in antitrust enforcement. It begins with an assessment that the United States suffers from a growing monopoly power problem, which increases the cost of goods and services, lowers wages, limits innovation, and exacerbates inequality. The courts, Congress, and the antitrust enforcement agencies all share responsibility for the rise of monopoly power.
The report offers three foundational policy actions to reinvigorate competition policy to ensure current and future economic growth is strong, equitable, and sustainable as the U.S. economy recovers from the coronavirus recession:
Enact new antitrust legislation and increase resources for antitrust enforcement
Revitalize antitrust enforcement to strengthen deterrence
Commit to a “whole government” approach to competition policy
Through these actions, the U.S. government can shift the nature of competition and reestablish the United States as a nation dedicated to promoting innovation, competition, and economic equality. Below is a brief summation of each of these policy actions.
The report is authored by Bill Baer, a visiting fellow (on leave) in government studies at The Brookings Institution; Jonathan B. Baker, research professor of law at American University Washington College of Law; Michael Kades, director for markets and competition policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth; Fiona Scott Morton, the Theodore Nierenberg professor of economics at the Yale University School of Management; Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carl Shapiro, professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Tim Wu, the Julius Silver professor of law, science and technology at Columbia Law School.
Antitrust scholars recognize a shift in the competitive nature of the U.S. economy; large firms’ increased profits come at the expense of their workers, customers, and competitors. While mergers in some industries, such as beer, may seem harmless, in reality, they frequently increase prices for consumers.
The antitrust laws today come up short in deterring anticompetitive behavior. One study of manufacturing plants found that mergers between competing firms resulted in increased markups yet little to no improvement in productivity or efficiency. Looking into an array of industries (for example, television, home building, dialysis centers, and even vitamins) reveals evidence of anticompetitive behavior and growing market power, along with its effects on wages, prices, or competition.
During the event, Dan Crane, professor of law at the University of Michigan, expressed skepticism with the report’s conclusion that the U.S. economy as a whole faces a competition issue. “[Competition] is a market-specific problem, and to recognize that fact is important to understanding the implications for legislation, reform, funding, and targeted enforcement going forward,” said Crane.
To that point, the authors of the report write that while antitrust enforcers should look at industries where there is evidence of anticompetitive conduct, on average, increased competition across the U.S. economy would address issues of inequality. Modern research indicates that growing market power hurts consumers, competitors, and vulnerable communities. The authors point to the macroeconomic implications of such market power increases, including decreased wages among low-skilled workers and a slowdown in output and Gross Domestic Product.
Rises in market power contribute to increases in income inequality. Low-skilled workers receive a lower share of profits, while stockholders and higher-skilled workers receive a higher share. Growing market power often is seen alongside monopsony power, where a single firm is the buyer of labor and has the power to set wages and working conditions for employees. Employer consolidation has effects on high-skilled workers. Evidence in the healthcare industry, for example, shows us that hospital mergers account for negative wage growth among high-skilled healthcare professionals but not mid- and low-skilled workers.
Enact new antitrust legislation and increase resources for antitrust enforcement
Flawed legal precedent and disproven economic theories haunt antitrust enforcement today. Over the past 40 years, the federal courts relied on antiquated neoclassical economic theories that resulted in widespread approval of anticompetitive practices. Simply asking for stricter enforcement will only have limited impact on widespread market power. Congress needs to update the antitrust laws to explicitly outline what the laws should prohibit and to prevent the courts from narrowing antitrust protections.
Doing so can prevent the courts from leaning on arguments that are skeptical of enforcement. The authors say that successful legislative reform would accomplish the following:
Correct flawedjudicialrules that reflect unsound economic theories or unsupported empirical claims
Clarify that the antitrust laws protect against competitive harms from the loss of potential and nascent competition, especially harms to innovation
Incorporate presumptions of illegality that better reflect the likelihood that certain practices harm competition
Recognize that, under some circumstances, conduct that creates a risk of substantial harm should be unlawful even if the harm cannot be shown to be more likely than not
Alter substantive legal standards and the allocation of pleading, production, and proof burdens to reduce barriers to demonstrating meritorious cases
The co-authors of the report argue that substantive antitrust reforms, procedural reforms, and providing financial resources to the antitrust agencies are critical for protecting competition.
In order to deploy these initiatives, the two federal antitrust enforcement agencies—the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division—need resources. The report recommends an additional $600 million in funding, which would compensate for stagnant funding over the past decade and allow for significant expansion of the three antitrust enforcement areas: criminal, merger, and civil nonmerger enforcement to address the growing market power problem. Additionally, more funding will enable the two agencies to conduct economic policy studies and merger retrospectives, and allow agency enforcers and economists to advocate for competitive practices throughout the government.
A commentator at the Equitable Growth event, Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University, was supportive of the reforms proposed in the report but advocated for a broader approach to the issue. “We should think about legislation not in just the narrow, but in multiple sectoral domains, if we want to infuse our economy with the spirit of competition,” said Sitaraman. New legislation, he said, can protect existing and possible competition, and should explicitly identify behaviors that are anticompetitive.
Countering that point, commentator Josh Soven, attorney at Wilson Sonsini, argued that while aggressive antitrust enforcement is important, legislative reform is not the route to take to promote competition because the government’s success in stopping potentially harmful mergers lies in the strength of the cases and evidence they bring to the courts. He said that building an unwavering case rather than reforming the antitrust laws will warrant a competitive outcome. The authors of the Equitable Growth report, however, see legislative reform as the strongest pathway toward improving issues of competition such as deterrence.
Revitalize antitrust enforcement to strengthen deterrence
On the topic of legislative reform, the panelists discussed the report’s recommendations for revitalizing antitrust enforcement to strengthen deterrence. Deterring anticompetitive behavior is crucial for effective antitrust enforcement. Current legal rules make that goal more challenging; courts too often have to set the threshold to prove a violation so high that the benefits of violating the antitrust laws exceed any possible penalties. In an economy where market power is common and spreading across various industries, strengthening deterrence requires a strategic enforcement agenda where the agencies target specific problems and leverage their resources to address them.
A successful agenda depends on leadership. The seven co-authors of the new report believe that new leadership must recognize that market power is a problem and must be committed to addressing it. They must understand the challenges faced by the agencies and stay committed to creating and executing an agenda that optimizes deterrence and protects the economy from anticompetitive behaviors.
On the topic of leadership, panelist Marc Lanoue, Federal Trade Commission attorney who has been detailed to serve as counsel for the minority on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, said that it is “important to select leaders that have a shared vision on competition policy enforcement … it would be helpful to have leaders at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission who are willing or even eager to collaborate not just on enforcement but also on longer-term projects of steering the law in a positive action to protect competition.”
Once strong leadership has been established, building a strategic enforcement agenda is the next priority. In developing an agenda, each agency should consider three approaches.
An industry-driven approach, where specific industries that suffer from repetitive instances of anticompetitive practices would be identified, would allow the agencies to hear cases in specific industries and coordinate with relevant regulatory bodies to address issues of competition. A harm-driven agenda identifies the ways anticompetitive behavior has harmed specific groups and addresses them through enforcement actions. Lastly, a doctrine-driven agenda identifies problematic anticompetitive conduct, and develops rules and doctrines that the courts can use to prevent such conduct.
Commit to a ‘whole government’ approach to competition policy
The second segment of the event delved into the third recommendation in the report: making competition a governmentwide priority to help address the growing market power problem. Antitrust enforcement is not the only tool to protect competition. Numerous agencies currently influence competition in the United States—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, but rarely coherently. The report recommends establishing a White House Office of Competition Policy to ensure that regulations do not unintentionally undermine competition and that the Federal Trade Commission uses its rulemaking power to promote competition.
The Office of Competition Policy would exist within the Executive Office of the President and be led by the National Economic Council. It would include members of various economic policy groups and offices. Among them would be the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget and its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the Domestic Policy Council. The establishment of a White House Competition Policy Office would support the “whole government” initiative by promoting regulations that improve markets and competition, preventing any rulemaking that may harm workers or consumers, and liaising with the agencies and other regulatory committees to tackle industry-specific issues of competition.
The report also recommends that the Federal Trade Commission should turn to rulemaking as an appropriate tool to protect competition. For example, although a different agency, the Federal Communication Commission’s phone number portability rule allows customers to transfer their numbers between phone carriers, making it easier for consumers to change carriers and thus increasing competition between those carriers. Similar to the FCC’s actions, the FTC could use its rulemaking to similarly promote competition.
Conclusion
The new Congress and the Biden administration have the opportunity to reverse the problems that plague U.S. competition. The goal of Equitable Growth’s recent antitrust transition report and its corresponding event is to elevate policy initiatives and ideas that promote a competitive economy. Reviving a procompetitive system will boost economic growth and innovation, create new jobs and lift wages, and protect our nation’s most vulnerable people from the harmful consequences of market power and monopolies’ profit-making.
1. The coronavirus recession continues to be a disaster for low-paid workers in jobs requiring personal contact. How permanent will this be? Human smiles and social intelligence are a powerful way people can add value. But there is an ongoing shift substituting information technology for human guidance in retail. Is this trend going to accelerate because of the pandemic? Read Kate Bahn and Carmen Sanchez Cumming, “U.S. retail sector’s recession experiences highlight continuing labor market travails,” in which they write: “Public health measures require limiting in-person services, and as a result, many industries saw sharp declines in employment … We examine … the retail industry … [which] in December 2020 … employed 410,000 fewer workers than in February of that year … sports, hobby, book, and music stores shrunk more than 17 percent between February 2020 and December 2020. Almost 1 in 4 clothing store jobs have been lost … Garden supply stores, nonstore retailers, and general merchandise … have actually grown … Workers employed in nonessential businesses and holding jobs that require face-to-face interactions … [are] more exposed … The downturn could be accelerating dynamics that were reshaping the retail sector well before the onset of the recession … Retail jobs are often the first rung in workers’ career ladders, making good jobs in retail an important piece of career advancement and influencing lifetime earnings growth. And while many workers transition out of the retail sector when switching jobs, workers of color in general and Black women in particular are less likely.”
2. This is rather pleasing news. Formal employer monopsony power as measured by standard concentration ratios does not appear to be a big deal in shifting income from labor to capital in the United States today. Of course, there remains the substantial puzzle that firms are not price takers even where buyers are not concentrated, but that is something that this very good paper cannot address. Read Gregor Schubert, Anna Stansbury, and Bledi Taska, “Employer Concentration and Outside Options,” in which they write: “We develop an instrument for employer concentration … estimate the effect of plausibly exogenous variation in employer concentration on wages across the large majority of U.S. occupations and metropolitan areas. Second, we … identify … relevant job options outside a worker’s own occupation using new occupational mobility data constructed from 16 million resumes … Moving from the median to the 95th percentile of employer concentration reduces wages by 3 percent. But we also reveal substantial heterogeneity: the effect of employer concentration is at least four times higher for low outward mobility occupations than those with high outward mobility. Since the majority of U.S. workers are not in highly concentrated labor markets, the aggregate effects of concentration on wages do not appear large enough to have substantial explanatory power for income inequality or wage stagnation. Nonetheless, our estimates suggest that a material subset of workers experience meaningful negative wage effects.”
3. I have never understood why anybody would ever have imagined that noncompete clauses could be a good thing for an economy. What is the externality that cannot otherwise be contracted around that such are supposed to fix? Only when an employee has knowledge that would allow a competitor that learns it to route around intellectual property protections would there be a case. That case would seem to hinge on the belief that our intellectual property protections are less than efficiently strong—an argument I do not see made often. Read David Balan, “Why noncompete clauses in employment contracts are by and large harmful to U.S. workers & the U.S. economy,” in which he writes: “For a firm to succeed in attracting workers by not requiring a noncompete, it would likely have to make the absence of a noncompete a central element of its recruiting message to the exclusion of other, likely more effective messages. Moreover, if only one or a few firms did not require a noncompete, then they would tend to attract the workers who care the most about avoiding a noncompete … The specific claims of positive effects … that they facilitate efficient transfer of knowledge … they facilitate efficient worker-funded employee training … Much information sharing will occur with or without a noncompete simply because it is impossible to operate the business any other way. The efficiency benefit is only the increment of information sharing … By the same logic that the noncompete increases the firm’s incentive to generate new knowledge, it decreases the worker’s incentive to do so … Noncompetes also impede the efficient flow of people across firms … Some training will occur with or without the noncompete simply because it is impossible to operate the business any other way … Standard economic theory indicates that, in a competitive labor market, training with benefits that exceed the costs will occur regardless. With a noncompete, the firm will pay the cost and receive the benefit, but without a noncompete, the worker will pay the cost (through formal schooling and/or lower wages early in a career) and receive the benefit. The training will occur regardless.”
Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:
1. Interesting and very useful numbers about the likely effects of the Biden administration’s economic support plan. If the U.S. economy recovers more rapidly than expected, well and good, the Federal Reserve can handle any excess aggregate demand problems. But if the economy does not recover more rapidly than expected, this looks to be a very welcome thing for the U.S. economy over the next several years. Read Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner, “The macroeconomic implications of Biden’s $1.9 trillion fiscal package,” in which they write: “We estimate that the package would boost economic activity, as measured by the level of real gross domestic product, by about 4 percent at the end of 2021 and 2 percent at the end of 2022, relative to a projection that assumes no additional fiscal support. We project that if the Biden package were enacted, GDP would reach the Congressional Budget Office’s pre-pandemic GDP projection after the third quarter of 2021, exceeding it by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. In the middle of 2022, GDP would show a temporary and shallow decline and then grow at an annual rate of about 1.5 percent, coming close to the path projected just before the pandemic.”
2. The health of an economy is different from the health of its manufacturing sector. The health of manufacturing as a productive enterprise is different from the number of workers employed in manufacturing. And the subunits and regional units of manufacturing are very, very different things as well. Do not presume that any of these are identical or even highly correlated with any of the others. Read Scott Lincicome, “Busting the ‘Deindustrialization’ Myth.” in which he writes: “Since trade often gets the blame for manufacturing job losses, it’s good to add Robert Lawrence’s 2020 examination of 60 developed and developing countries between 1995 and 2011, which found that nations with manufacturing trade surpluses actually experienced slightly larger declines in manufacturing employment than those with manufacturing trade deficits. He also found that manufacturing job losses were as large in countries with “improving” manufacturing trade balances over this period as those with “worsening” ones. Why? Because manufacturing job loss is less a story of “deindustrialization” and more one of economic development. In general, all countries generally follow the same “inverted-U” pattern of development, first adding and then losing manufacturing jobs as they get richer (and gaining services jobs over the same timeframe).”
This is a post we publish each Friday 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 relevant and interesting articles 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
Each month, we highlight a group of scholars doing ground-breaking work in specific areas of the social sciences in a series called Expert Focus as part of our commitment to build a community of scholars working to understand how inequality affects broadly shared economic growth. This month, Christian Edlagan, Michael Garvey, and Maria Monroe look at those scholars working at the intersection of climate change and economic inequality. These experts are attempting to assess the full effects of climate change across communities, income and wealth distributions, firms and workers, and the macroeconomy.
U.S. workers are frequently asked to sign noncompete clause as part of their work contracts, preventing them from taking their knowledge and talent to competing companies. Older theoretical arguments claim that these clauses are actually beneficial for workers and firms, citing the ideas that both parties agree to the noncompetes before signing and that noncompetes facilitate knowledge-sharing between firms and workers as well as firm-sponsored training of workers. David Balan explains in a recent Competitive Edge post that these arguments are weak and stand in tension with recent empirical evidence of the harms of noncompete clauses. Balan summarizes the findings in his accompanying working paper and then critiques each of the pro-noncompete arguments to show how these clauses are detrimental to workers. He demonstrates why they are actually largely a means for companies to extract additional value from their employees or to treat them poorly—and why policy solutions must treat noncompetes as such.
Employer concentration likewise has harmful, wage-suppressing effects on millions of U.S. workers, writes Anna Stansbury, and policymakers must respond accordingly. In a recent working paper by Stansbury and her co-authors, they propose a new method for estimating the causal effect of employer concentration, or monopsony, on wages. They find that monopsony lowers earnings for a significant set of workers, primarily those who have few options to move to other jobs or industries and those in lower-population areas. Their new method of measuring the causal effects of monopsony could have a significant impact on U.S. antitrust laws and labor market policy to combat excessive market power. Stansbury suggests that labor market regulators and antitrust enforcers respond with increased scrutiny on labor markets and use of policies that raise wages for workers directly, such as increasing the minimum wage or empowering unions.
In case you missed it: The deadline for Equitable Growth’s 2021 Request for Proposals is February 7, 2021. Equitable Growth supports research on whether and how inequality affects economic growth, and this year’s RFP has centered research on race and structural racism, as well as climate change.
Head over to Brad DeLong’s latest Worthy Reads, where he provides his takes on must-read content from Equitable Growth and around the web.
Links from around the web
President Joe Biden released details of his sweeping climate change plan, placing environmental justice at its core, reportThe Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Darryl Fears. President Biden’s unprecedented plan to treat climate change “as the emergency that it is” (according to a White House official) will also tackle the persistent racial and economic disparities in the United States and invest in low-income communities of color—which are disproportionately affected by pollution and climate change. Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities often are targeted for the placement of environmental hazards and eyesores, from power plants and landfills to hazardous waste depositories and trash incinerators, the Post reporters explain. This leads to disproportionate rates of disease and illness in these communities—which, in turn, leaves them more vulnerable to the worst effects of the coronavirus. President Biden’s climate plan aims to improve conditions for people of color so as to address the vast, longstanding inequalities and barriers these communities experience across the United States.
U.S. companies are using the pandemic to squash unionization efforts and reduce the power of collective bargaining, writesThe Guardian’s Michael Sainato. Telling the stories of several groups of workers who believe they are shut out of employment by companies trying to break unions, Sainato shows how the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated various firms’ and industries’ use of lockouts, or work stoppages that are “initiated by the employer in a labor dispute where the employer uses replacement workers,” who are typically nonunion. In economic downturns, such as the coronavirus recession, lockouts reduce the power of unions and collective bargaining because of the higher availability of replacement workers due to high unemployment rates. Many of these workers are shut out for merely asking for better protections, hazard pay, and more favorable working conditions as they risk their lives during the pandemic.
During most economic downturns, both workers and investors face hard times. But during the coronavirus recession, only workers really felt pain, writes Robert Gebeloff in The New York Times’ The Upshot blog. This is largely thanks to the stock market, Gebeloff explains, which boomed despite the raging public health crisis and imploding job market—deepening existing inequalities in the U.S. economy. Just 1 in 6 American families report direct ownership of stocks, and the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans hold about 84 percent of all the value of financial accounts with stocks—meaning as the market soars, the wealthy get wealthier while their less well-off counterparts don’t share in the profits. The wealth divide in the United States is even wider than already-gaping U.S. income inequality, and racial disparities are even larger, Gebeloff reports, with Black Americans owning a disproportionately low share of assets and stocks.
