Where Are All the Good Jobs Going?: What National and Local Job Quality and Dynamics Mean for U.S. Workers

Notes

171 CHAPTER 1 1. See, for instance, Anderson and Gascon (2007). Louis Uchitelle (2006) also documents the severe economic and psychological costs associated with permanent layoffs from work and how these might feed popular anxiety. 2. Analyses of trends in real wages over time are quite sensitive to how we adjust for inflation. Given that the consumer price index (CPI) tends to overstate inflation, computations of real earnings growth over several decades might understate such growth. See Eckstein and Nagypál (2004) for a balanced discussion of these issues. For evidence on the extent to which productivity growth has mostly benefited those with very high earnings over the past few decades, see Piketty and Saez (2003) and Dew-Becker and Gordon (2005). 3. On this issue, see, for instance, the congressional testimony of Peter Orszag (2007) when he was director of the Congressional Budget Office. 4. Eckstein and Nagypál, 2004. 5. See Brown, Haltiwanger, and Lane (2006) for evidence of strong labor market gains by many workers in a volatile labor market. 6. See Levy and Murnane (2004); Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2006); and Goldin and Katz (2008) for further discussion of these issues. 7. See Levy and Temin (2007) and Card and DiNardo (2006) for discussions that emphasize institutional as well as market determinants of rising inequality. 8. See Krueger and Summers (1987) for industry effects on wages, and Brown, Hamilton, and Medoff (1990) for an analysis of the effects of firm size. 9. See Katz (1986) for a discussion of the research on “efficiency wages,” and Appelbaum, Bernhardt, and Murnane (2003) for a broader discussion of how firms choose their compensation levels and practices in a variety of major sectors. 10. See Abowd and Kramarz (1999); Andersson, Holzer, and Lane (2005); and Holzer (1996). Notes 172 Notes 11. See Dobbs and Myers (2004), for instance. 12. See Freeman (2007a) and Blinder (2007). 13. See Goldin and Katz (2008). 14. See Thomas Friedman’s (2009) discussion in the New York Times, especially the quote from Lawrence Katz. 15. Among men, the drop in employment in durable manufacturing has been sharper. 16. See Freeman (2007b) and Hirsch (2008). 17. See Economic Policy Institute (2008). 18. See Levy and Murnane (2004). 19. Although some of the forces generating greater competition in the product market—like an undervalued Chinese renminbi—may not reflect true underlying competitive forces, they nonetheless have the effect of generating more competitive pressure in that market. 20. See Reich (2007) for a broad description of how product and capital markets have become more competitive over time. Since harnessing economic forces such as new technologies and globalization is somewhat costly for firms, it makes sense that firms are more likely to incur such costs when those forces could reduce employment more among higher-wage than lower-wage employees , thereby making labor demand more elastic. 21. Barry Hirsch (2008) argues that one source of difficulty for unions in the past few decades has been their inability to offset higher wages with rising productivity in more competitive labor markets. 22. For instance, in contrast to the claim that Costco can compete successfully with Wal-Mart despite its more generous compensation packages, Robert Reich (2007) argues that Costco’s customers have, on average, much higher incomes than Wal-Mart’s customers and that Costco has had more difficulty in the capital markets in the past few years. 23. See Levy and Murnane (2004) and Autor, Katz, and Kearny (2006). 24. See Holzer and Lerman (2007, 2008) for broad descriptions of the kinds of middle-skill jobs that have remained in high demand over the past two decades and will continue to be in high demand over the next decade. See also Council of Economic Advisers (2009) for a report that predicts some recovery in demand for moderately skilled labor in industries such as construction and manufacturing. 25. See Andersson, Holzer, and Lane (2005). 26. Some recent research also suggests that displaced workers can suffer from deteriorating health and rising mortality, while their children endure educational setbacks and long-term earnings losses; see Oreopoulos, Page, and Stevens (2008) and von Wachter (2010). 27. See Jacobson et al. (1993); Kletzer and Fairlie (2003); and Farber (2007). 28. Most educational policy in the United States is determined by state and local Notes 173 school agencies, while most federal job training dollars (from the Workforce Investment Act) are distributed locally as well by...