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Title: The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Binder, Ariel J. Bound, John |
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The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men NBER Working Paper No. 25577, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2019. Also: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25577 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Labor Force Participation; Labor Market Outcomes; Male Sample; Marriage; Wage Growth Over the last half century, U.S. wage growth stagnated, wage inequality rose, and the labor-force participation rate of prime-age men steadily declined. In this article, we examine these labor market trends, focusing on outcomes for males without a college education. Though wages and participation have fallen in tandem for this population, we argue that the canonical neo-classical framework, which postulates a labor demand curve shifting inward across a stable labor supply curve, does not reasonably explain the data. Alternatives we discuss include adjustment frictions associated with labor demand shocks and effects of the changing marriage market--that is, the fact that fewer less-educated men are forming their own stable families--on male labor supply incentives. Our observations lead us to be skeptical of attempts to attribute the secular decline in male labor-force participation to a series of separately-acting causal factors. We argue that the correct interpretation probably involves complicated feedback between falling labor demand and other factors which have disproportionately affected men without a college education. |
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Bibliography Citation
Binder, Ariel J. and John Bound. "The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men." NBER Working Paper No. 25577, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2019. |