Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s

Mouw, Ted; Kalleberg, Arne L.

doi:10.1177/0003122410363564

Cited by 230 publications

(233 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

221

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The CPS specifically prompts the respondents to include overtime pay, tips, bonuses, and commissions, which helps ensure that these earnings are included in addition to one's base pay. We conducted additional analysis using logged annual earnings and unimputed earnings data to gauge the potential effects of work-hour polarization (Jacobs and Gerson 2005) and hot-deck imputation (Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). The results were substantively similar to the results presented below.…”

Section: Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing Apart: The Changing Firm-Size Wage Premium and Its Inequality Consequences

Cobb

Lin

2017

Organization Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wage inequality in the United States has risen dramatically over the past few decades, prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend. This study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor-market institution that mitigates inequality. By compensating their low-and middle-wage employees with a greater premium than their higher-wage counterparts, large U.S. firms reduced overall wage dispersion. Yet, broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms' role as an equalizing institution. Using data from the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we find that in 1989, although all private-sector workers benefited from a firm-size wage premium, the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end. Between 1989 and 2014, the average firm-size wage premium declined markedly. The decline, however, was exclusive to those at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution, while there was no change for those at the higher end. As such, the uneven declines in the premium across the wage spectrum could account for about 20% of rising wage inequality during this period, suggesting that firms are of great importance to the study of rising inequality.Keywords firm-size wage premium, inequality, internal labor market, employment relationship Disciplines Management Sciences and Quantitative MethodsThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons:

show abstract

Section: Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing Apart: The Changing Firm-Size Wage Premium and Its Inequality Consequences

Cobb

Lin

2017

Organization Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the U.S. Current Population Survey, the percentage for whom wages had to be imputed increased from 14% in 1983 to 33% in 2008 (Mouw and Kalleberg 2010).…”

Section: Decline In Respondent Cooperationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do low survey response rates bias results? Evidence from Japan

Rindfuss¹,

Choe²,

Tsuya³

et al. 2015

DemRes

162

114

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

BACKGROUNDIn developed countries, response rates have dropped to such low levels that many in the population field question whether the data can provide unbiased results. OBJECTIVEThe paper uses three Japanese surveys conducted in the 2000s to ask whether low survey response rates bias results. A secondary objective is to bring results reported in the survey response literature to the attention of the demographic research community. METHODSUsing a longitudinal survey as well as paradata from a cross-sectional survey, a variety of statistical techniques (chi square, analysis of variance (ANOVA), logistic regression, ordered probit or ordinary least squares regression (OLS), as appropriate) are used to examine response-rate bias. RESULTSEvidence of response-rate bias is found for the univariate distributions of some demographic characteristics, behaviors, and attitudinal items. But when examining relationships between variables in a multivariate analysis, controlling for a variety of background variables, for most dependent variables we do not find evidence of bias from low response rates. COMMENTSThe results have two implications. First, demographers should not presume the presence or absence of low response-rate bias; rather they should test for it in the context of a specific substantive analysis. Second, demographers should lobby data gatherers to collect as much paradata as possible so that rigorous tests for low response-rate bias are possible. IntroductionSample surveys (cross-sectional and longitudinal) have become the dominant data source used by population researchers. Response rates, both the initial response rate and attrition rates in longitudinal studies, have historically been an important rough-andready yardstick to judge data quality. Response rates 6 have been declining in urbanized, high-income countries to the point where many cross-sectional surveys now have response rates below 50% (Atrostic et al. 2001;Brick and Williams 2013;de Leeuw and de Heer 2002;Groves 2011;Singer 2006). The survey literature has long recognized that low response rates only indicate potential bias (e.g., Lessler and Kalsbeck 1992), yet the almost automatic response among most in the population field has been to equate low response rates with poor data quality. Low response rates produce bias only to the extent that there are differences between responders and non-responders on the estimate(s) of interest, and then only if such differences cannot be eliminated or controlled for through the use of observable and available characteristics of responders and non-responders. The difficulty in evaluating non-response bias is that measures of the variable(s) of interest and characteristics of non-responders are generally not observed, and hence the population field has tended to rely on the presumption that low response rates necessarily mean low data quality.In this paper, using surveys designed by demographers and variables that have often been used as dependent variables in demographic research, we examine this 6 ...

show abstract

“…Although "possibly the most striking phenomenon in the British labour market […] has been the massive rise in wage inequality" (Dickens 2000:27), relatively little is known about the relationship between occupations and growing British wage inequality, unlike for the United States where a small literature has recently sprung up directly tackling the issue (Weeden, Kim et al 2007;Kim and Sakamoto 2008;Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). In what follows, we revisit the well-known take-off in British wage inequality and provide a detailed descriptive account of its relationship to the changing occupational structure to systematically establish the basic facts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Occupations and British Wage Inequality, 1970s-2000s

Williams¹

2012

European Sociological Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Occupations provide a central unit of analysis for economic inequality in stratification research for two main reasons. First, occupations are supposed to structure inequality. Second, occupations are supposed to proxy as a source of inequality. Although there was a 'massive rise' in British wage inequality, relatively little is known about the relationship between the occupations and growing British wage inequality, and the sparse empirical research is inconclusive. Since sociologists traditionally have tended to place a great deal of emphasis on occupations, we might expect the changing structure of occupations and changing occupational wages to play a key role in accounting for trends in overall British wage inequality. More recent strands of stratification theory, however, have challenged the idea that occupations structure economic inequalities, and argue that the link between occupations and wages might have been weakening over time, instead predicting that growing wage inequality mostly occurs within occupations. We decompose trends in British wage inequality into between-occupation and within-occupation components and show that, although most wage inequality is within occupations, it is inequality between occupations that accounts for the lion's share of changes in wage inequality trends. Furthermore, trends in between-occupation inequality cannot be 'explained away' by fundamental labour market changes such as rising educational attainment and the decline in collective bargaining. We also demonstrate what the rise in between-occupation inequality implies for the British 'big class' structure using the NS-SEC social class schema. We show that growing between-occupation inequality can be more or less described as growing between-class inequality. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

show abstract

Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s

Cited by 230 publications

References 36 publications

Growing Apart: The Changing Firm-Size Wage Premium and Its Inequality Consequences

Growing Apart: The Changing Firm-Size Wage Premium and Its Inequality Consequences

Do low survey response rates bias results? Evidence from Japan

Occupations and British Wage Inequality, 1970s-2000s

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About