Weekend reading: “Equal Pay Day” edition

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.

With Equal Pay Day having occurred earlier this week, we’ve decided to feature only the work of women in our “Links from around the web.” 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 released a new report, “Gender wage inequality: What we know and how we can fix it,” by Sarah Jane Glynn, on April 10—Equal Pay Day—the date symbolizing how far into the year women in the United States must work to earn what men earned the previous year. The report details the multiple drivers of pay inequality, and what steps need to be taken at the state and local level to address it.

Sarah Jane Glynn also authored an op-ed published in the Lansing State Journal with Heather Boushey. The authors discuss why pay inequality is not just a “women’s issue,” but rather one that affects entire families and the economy as a whole.

Kate Bahn unpacks the arguments used to support legislation that would impose work requirements on government programs that support low-income workers and their families, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Bahn details the research showing that work requirements are counterproductive and harmful.

A new Equitable Growth working paper looks at Texas charter schools from 2001-2011. The authors find that while charter schools were on average of lower quality than public schools at the beginning of the time period, charters eventually surpassed public schools in effectiveness by the latter half of the decade. One of the co-authors of the paper, University of Illinois at Chicago’s Marcus Casey, also wrote an analysis highlighting these results, which differ from previous studies that look at educational reforms at a single point in time.

More job vacancies in the United States are still producing fewer hires even after accounting for the strength of the U.S. labor market. In a new issue brief, Nick Bunker explains why “employer complaints about being unable to find workers to fill jobs should be taken with a grain of salt” because employers themselves may be the problem.

Links from around the web

Journalism continues to be a male-dominated field, and women are particularly underrepresented among those who write about the economy and certain economic issues. This is a small sample of female writers who do, helping broaden our perspective on how the economy works—and doesn’t work—for broad swaths of the American populace.  

 Joelle Gamble examines the latest study by Raj Chetty and his coauthors on race and mobility in the United States. Gamble talks about the limitations of the research in understanding why racial inequality in the United States has persisted for generations. [the nation]

In the 1980s, the United States was outranked only by Sweden in terms of the proportion of prime age women in the labor force. Today, that’s far from the case. Heather Long details a new International Monetary Fund report warning that our country’s failure to help working women could have significant consequences for the national economy in future years. [wonkblog]

Many people assume that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes. Alexia Fernández Campbell debunks this myth and talks about a new study finding that, in fact, undocumented immigrants paid $23.6 billion in income taxes in 2015. [vox]

Laura Kusisto highlights how people moving into expensive U.S. cities such as New York, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angles are much wealthier than the people moving out. She says new research finds that, “expensive American metros are losing lower- and middle-income families who help power sectors of the economy such as restaurants and hotels and public services […] to completely different metropolitan areas.” [wsj]

After having a child, the gender pay gap between a husband and wife doubles. But the age at which a woman has her baby may determine what happens next. Claire Cain Miller writes that women who have their first child between 25 and 35 never close the salary gaps with their husband, while those who have their first child before or after this period do. [the upshot]

Friday figure

From “Gender wage inequality: What we know and how we can fix it,” by Sarah Jane Glynn

April 13, 2018

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