This report provides current and historical labor force information about young people ages 16 to 24. In general, youth have a lower rate of labor force participation, and those who are in the labor force are less likely to gain employment than older workers. On the labor supply side, young people are making greater investments in education by…

According to Sheldon Danziger and David Ratner, changes in the labor market over the past thirty-five years, such as labor-saving technological changes, increased globalization, declining unionization, and the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, have made it more difficult for young adults to attain the economic stability and…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

Information based on a supplement to the January 1987 Current Population Survey provides statistics on occupational tenure by age, sex, race, employment status, occupation, and education level. Results indicated that men have worked longer at their current occupations than women, Whites longer than Blacks, and college graduates longer than the…

The study is based on an analysis of recent trends in youth unemployment from published sources and on additional analysis of a national sample of young men and young women 16 to 18 years of age who were followed longitudinally over a seven year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book establishes the dimensions of youth unemployment and…

Uses census data from 1973-1981 to examine patterns of employment and unemployment during recession and recovery phases of the business cycle among Hispanic, Black, and White youth, aged 16-19. Describes intra-Hispanic differences by gender and ethnic subgroup. Contains eight statistical tables. (SV)

Although the gap between women's and men's wages differs slightly depending on how the gap is measured, no matter how they are measured, women's earnings are below those received by men in 97% of the occupations for which data are available. Since 1979, women's earnings have been climbing when compared with men's earnings, gaining steeply during…

Data assembled from the sequence of Current Population Survey (CPS) tenure supplements for 1973, 1978, 1981, 1983, 1987, and 1991 were analyzed along with demographic characteristics and other variables available from the general CPS to identify changes in job retention rates in the United States throughout the 1980s. The analysis was based on…

This research brief highlights student employment trends and their implications for higher education, and identifies major sources of national data on the subject. Text and tables provide data on: (1) number and percentage of college students employed, by age range, for 1988; (2) changes in the number and percent of employed college students, from…

An examination of changes in the job market for college graduates between 1960 and 1980 forms the basis for speculating on the opportunities in 1990. The job market in 1970 was better than in either 1960 or 1980; job opportunities will continue to decline through the 1980s. (Author/MLW)

Congress justified the recent reform of federal welfare policy in part by citing the increase in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload since the late 1960s. The caseload, i.e., the number of families using AFDC, is determined by the number of families eligible to participate and by the proportion of these families who use the…

Employing two widely used approaches to identify the effects of monetary policy, this paper explores the differential impact of policy on the labor market outcomes of teenagers, minorities, out-of-school youth, and less-skilled individuals. Evidence from recursive vector autoregressions and autoregressive distributed lag models that use…

This study is an empirical analysis of urban employment changes in the United States between 1980 and 1984. The paper follows other recent work on the economics of urban and regional employment growth. Particular attention is paid to the effects on employment of schooling attainment and per pupil schooling expenditures. In addition, the effect of…

Links between family structure and the changing poverty of 231,996 U.S. children are examined using child records from 1960, 1970, and 1980 Public Use Microdata samples and the 1988 March Current Population Survey. Results suggest that child poverty and racial inequality cannot be separated from changing family structure. (SLD)

After remaining virtually unchanged from 1995 through the 1970s, the wage gap between women and men began to decline in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the ratio of the annual earnings of women employed full time year-round to the annual earnings of their male counterparts reached 72.0%. That ratio decreased slightly (to 71.4%) in 1995. The wage…