Low-Wage Job Growth, Polarization, and the Limits and Opportunities of the Service Economy

Figure 2.

Job Growth Across Job-Wage Terciles Stacked by Full-Time and Part-Time Status

Source: Authors' analysis based on 1983–2017 data from the Current Population Survey (NBER 2019).

Note: Jobs are defined by the cells in a matrix of detailed occupations by economic sectors. Job-wage terciles are defined by jobs ranked by median hourly wage: job cells are rank-ordered on the basis of median hourly wages, and these rank-ordered job-cells grouped into equal population terciles at the beginning of each period. The top (third) tercile thus represents the one-third of the employed labor force in the best-paying types of jobs and the bottom (first) tercile represents the one-third of the employed labor force in the worst-paying types of jobs. The number of categories varied for different periods because of occupation and sector coding changes in the CPS. Full time and part time defined as usual hours worked per week.