This report tracks annual hours worked by prime-age adults by gender, race, ethnicity, wage level, and family structure. The trends across so many different groups are hard to summarize briefly, but one particular pattern stands out: workers seem to be increasingly separating into two groups: prime-age adults who are falling out of, or never get … Continue reading
The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 43.7 million in 2016. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.5% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.7%) in 1970. However, today’s immigrant share remains … Continue reading
How much do demographic changes affect the overall LFP rate trend? To quantify how much of the decline in the aggregate LFP rate is driven by changes in the composition of the population, we construct two hypothetical aggregate LFP rate scenarios. In this approach, we use Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata from the Bureau for … Continue reading
In 2015, household income was unevenly distributed: Households at the top of the income distribution received significantly more income than households at the bottom of the distribution. In 2015, average household income before accounting for means-tested transfers and federal taxes was $20,000 for the lowest quintile and $292,000 for the highest quintile. After transfers and … Continue reading
Overall, South American immigrants represented 7 percent (or 3.2 million) of the 44.5 million foreign born in the United States in 2017—up from 1 percent in 1960. While their numbers have increased, South Americans remain well behind the rest of Latin America, with significantly larger immigrant populations in the United States from Mexico and Central … Continue reading
Business and academia in the U.S. have traditionally been able to equip new workforce recruits with the hard skills they need to perform at a high level in the workplace. But with the regular ow of new technologies and business models into the market, today’s employees must navigate all this change with a varied skill … Continue reading
Newsroom employees are more likely to be white and male than U.S. workers overall. There are signs, though, of a turning tide: Younger newsroom employees show greater racial, ethnic and gender diversity than their older colleagues, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. More than three-quarters (77%) of newsroom employees … Continue reading
Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 250,000 in October, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in manufacturing, in construction, and in transportation and warehousing. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent in October, and the number of unemployed … Continue reading
Every month for the last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ wage data releases have continued to demonstrate that workers simply aren’t getting ahead. Despite some nominal growth, real wage growth has been consistently hovering around zero (rising at just a 0.2 percent annual rate from 2016-2017). At the same time, this year’s annual data release from the Census Bureau showed us that the median household income has risen to $61,370 in 2017, a 1.8 percent increase even after … Continue reading
Lots of measures are telling us that the United States labor market is doing well. In some cases, very well. Most prominently, the unemployment rate has fallen steadily over the last nine years. It dipped to 3.7 percent in September, and it has averaged 4 percent over the past year, the same as it did … Continue reading
The plain fact is that we train far more humanities Ph.D.s than there are jobs for. In a recent year, the American History Association reported about 340 tenure-track job openings for historians, plus maybe another hundred jobs outside history departments that might recruit a historian. In the same year, American universities minted about 1,150 new … Continue reading
Each $1 billion in exports to another country from the United States supports some American jobs. However, each $1 billion in imports from another country leads to job loss—by eliminating existing jobs and preventing new job creation—as imports displace goods that otherwise would have been made in the United States by domestic workers.3 The net … Continue reading
Programs designed to help disadvantaged workers improve their labor-market prospects may have effects beyond improvements in employment rates and income. One possible supplementary effect is improvements in subjective well-being, or how participants feel about their current life situations. Subjective well-being is important because there are social costs related to lower levels of well-being, and because … Continue reading
The U.S. Census Bureau collects data and publishes estimates on income and poverty in order to evaluate national economic trends as well as to understand their impact on the well-being of households, families, and individu-als. This report presents data on income and poverty in the United States based on information collected in the 2018 and earlier Current … Continue reading
The number of available jobs in the U.S. exceed the number of job seekers by more than 650,000 in July—a gap that has been growing—in a sign of an increasingly tight labor market that is altering how employers find workers. Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Job Openings Exceed Unemployed Americans Again … Continue reading