The profile of immigrants to Canada can vary between admission years. Immigrants can face challenges when they arrive in Canada, such as acquiring the ability to speak at least one of the official languages or getting their foreign credentials recognized. The immigrants admitted to Canada in 2015 earned the highest entry wages of any cohort admitted since 1981. … Continue reading
The unemployment rate ended 2018 at just under 4%, substantially lower than most estimates of the natural rate. Could such an ostensibly tight labor market lead to a sharp pickup in wage growth from its recent moderate pace, such that the relationship between wage growth and unemployment is not always linear? Investigations using state-level data … Continue reading
Europe’s labour market is set to become even more polarised, largely due to the growth of jobs at the very bottom of the wage distribution. However, across the EU28, there is considerable heterogeneity in the patterns of structural change by job-wage quintile, with many Member States projected to upgrade their occupational structure towards higher paying … Continue reading
The profile of immigrants to Canada can vary between admission years. Immigrants can face challenges when they arrive in Canada, such as acquiring the ability to speak at least one of the official languages or getting their foreign credentials recognized. The immigrants admitted to Canada in 2015 earned the highest entry wages of any cohort admitted since 1981. … Continue reading
Several OECD countries have been grappling not only with slow productivity growth but have also experienced a slowdown in real average wage growth relative to productivity growth, which has been reflected in a falling share of wages in GDP. At the same time, growth in low and median wages has been lagging behind average wage … 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
Analysing pay growth for those in continuous employment. Figure 5 does this by showing the median pay rise for those remaining in the same job from year-to-year and those remaining in employment but switching jobs. Typical pay change for people remaining in work over a year Source: RF analysis of ONS, ASHE (post April 2017 … Continue reading
In Don’t Fear the Robots: Why Automation Doesn’t Mean the End of Work, Roosevelt Fellow Mark Paul challenges the narrative that large-scale automation will imminently lead to mass unemployment and economic insecurity. He debunks the idea that we are on the cusp of a major technological change that will drastically alter the nature of work, … Continue reading
With falling labor market dynamism in the United States, opportunities within firms take on increasing importance in young workers’ career progression. Developing a variety of occupational ranking metrics, the author shows that occupational mobility within firms follows a standard life cycle pattern in which the frequency, distance, and wage return from mobility falls with age. … Continue reading
For large shares of the population in the advanced economies, there has really been no positive movement or no sense of progress in terms of where their incomes have gone over the last one to two decades. When we looked at the data across the US as well as a set of European economies, we … Continue reading
With the nationwide unemployment rate at 4.1 percent, the lowest since 2000, economists have been surprised by the slow growth in workers’ paychecks. Historically, when that few people are unemployed, companies have had to pay more to attract workers — simple supply and demand. But maybe competition for workers isn’t quite as intense as the … Continue reading
In the aggregate the US labor market is doing quite well. Unemployment is currently below 5%, and real weekly earnings of full-time workers increased from the 2000 cyclical peak to the current period of near full employment. The difficulties lie behind the aggregates. Earnings inequality continues to rise, with the growth in earnings most prevalent … Continue reading
There is substantial interest in measuring not just the quantity of new jobs but the quality as well. Existing surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics describe the number of new jobs created each month, as well as wages of incumbent workers, but not wages (or other characteristics) of newly created jobs. This paper aims … Continue reading
Even as job markets are tight in many major economies, low unemployment is failing to spur robust increases in wages, leaving workers angry. In many major countries, including the United States, Britain and Japan, labor markets are exceedingly tight, with jobless rates a fraction of what they were during the crisis of recent years. Yet workers … Continue reading