Labor Market Trends and Outcomes: What Has Changed since the Great Recession?

Erica Groshen and Harry Holzer

No 21-342, Upjohn Working Papers from W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Abstract: We describe trends in wages and labor force participation for the “working class”—whom we define as workers with high school or less education—compared to those with college or more. We compare cyclical peaks over the entire period 1979–2019, with particular focus on the Great Recession (2007–2010) and recovery (2010–2019). We also present results by gender and race. We find real wage growth in the latter period for all workers, but not enough to change the long-term trends of growing inequality and stagnant wages for the less-educated; and we also find that labor force participation continued to decline for the less-educated, even during the recovery. Gaps between whites and blacks also grew, while Hispanics and Asians made more progress. We consider various explanations of these findings and show that the early effects of the 2020-2021 pandemic recession hurt less-educated workers and those of color more than anyone else.

Keywords: Wages; participation; working class; Great Recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar ... ext=up_workingpapers (application/pdf)
This material is copyrighted. Permission is required to reproduce any or all parts.

Related works:
Journal Article: Labor Market Trends and Outcomes: What Has Changed since the Great Recession? (2021)
Working Paper: Labor Market Trends and Outcomes: What Has Changed since the Great Recession? (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upj:weupjo:21-342

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Upjohn Working Papers from W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research 300 S. Westnedge Ave. Kalamazoo, MI 49007 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().