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143 What have we learned about long-term trends in job quality and volatility in the previous chapters, and what do these findings imply for trends in inequality and insecurity among workers in the United States? What kinds of good jobs are growing in this country, and who is getting them? What happens to workers who lose good jobs, especially if they are less educated? What kinds of firms generate new good jobs? How do these trends play out in metropolitan areas, large and small? And what does all of this mean for policy—especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession and our slow recovery from it? In the previous chapters, we have explored these issues with a unique and enormous administrative data set from the U.S. Census Bureau, focused on twelve states in the period of 1992 to 2003. Here we review the main findings of these chapters, and then we discuss their implications for economic and labor market policy at the federal, state, and local levels. A REVIEW OF OUR PREVIOUS FINDINGS We began in chapter 2 with an analysis of the kinds of firms and jobs that pay relatively high wages, controlling for worker skills, and the kinds of workers who get these jobs. Our primary measure of job quality was the firm fixed effect, which measures how well the firm and job pay any particular workers after controlling for their personal skills. The skills themselves are mostly measured by the person fixed effect, which we showed is quite highly correlated with a worker’s educational attainment but also is likely to capture a broader range of skills that are rewarded in the labor market. We calculated firm and person effects separately for each firm and each worker over the periods of 1992 to 1995, 1996 to 1999, and 2000 to 2003, as well as the entire period. We then measured the extent of employment Chapter 6 Conclusion and Policy Implications 144 Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? growth for jobs of different quality levels, where these jobs were located (by industry), and the extent to which the skill levels of workers filling jobs of different quality were themselves changing over time. Our findings indicate that high-quality jobs are more likely to be found in certain kinds of firms (especially larger ones) and certain industries— including construction, durable manufacturing, and wholesale trade, but also professional services and finance. Less-educated workers are more likely to obtain good jobs in the former industries, and more-educated workers in the latter. Over time, jobs in both the highest and lowest quality categories have grown a bit more rapidly than those in the middle categories of quality, consistent with the notion of growing labor market polarization, but the differences in growth rates across quality categories are relatively small, and substantial growth has occurred in the middle categories as well. Perhaps more importantly, the nature and locations of good jobs changed over the twelve-year period that we studied, with many fewer good jobs found in manufacturing over time and more in the professional services and finance. Middle-quality jobs were also more likely to be found in construction, health care, public administration, or retail trade. And consistent with these changes, the ability of less-educated workers (or those with lower person effects) to obtain high-quality jobs seemed to diminish somewhat over time. This suggests that good worker skills and education are increasingly becoming preconditions for obtaining high-quality jobs, with worker quality and job quality increasingly becoming complements to rather than substitutes for one another. It also implies rising economic inequality, unless the skills of the workers at the bottom to middle of the distribution begin to rise. In chapter 3, we analyzed rates of job changing, including a measure (admittedly imperfect) of involuntary job displacement. We measured trends across job quality categories over time in rates of job changing and displacement—especially for workers with some minimal level of job seniority (or “tenure”), who tend to sacrifice the wage gains associated with such tenure when they leave or lose jobs, even if they move to better ones. Then we analyzed the extent to which job-leavers and job-losers found jobs of higher or lower quality over time, and how changes in job quality over time were related to earnings changes for these workers. We also estimated these effects separately for each of our three subperiods—1992 to 1995, 1996 to 1999, and...

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