Revisiting wage, earnings, and hours profiles

Peter Rupert () and Giulio Zanella

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: We document empirical life cycle profiles of wages, earnings, and hours of work for pay from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, following the same workers for up to four decades along the intensive margin of labor supply. For six of the eight cohorts we analyze the wage profile does not decline with age, while the earnings profile always does. The discrepancy is explained by a sharp drop of the hours profile beginning shortly after age 50, when many workers start a smooth transition into retirement by working progressively fewer hours. This pattern is not an artifact of staggered abrupt retirement, and is robust to attrition- and selection correction (i.e., to taking into account that the composition of our sample, for a given cohort, changes over time). We explore the nontrivial restrictions on dynamic models of the aggregate economy that this evidence suggests, and we provide numerical profiles that can be readily used in quantitative macroeconomic analysis.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; life cycle; wage profile; labor supply; intensive margin human capital; preretirement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/61f2f1hv.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revisiting wage, earnings, and hours profiles (2015)
Working Paper: Revisiting wage, earnings, and hours profiles (2014)
Working Paper: Revisiting Wage, Earnings, and Hours Profiles (2010)
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:cdl:ucsbec:qt61f2f1hv

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().