Abstract
We present new estimates of earnings volatility over time and the life cycle for men and women by race and human capital, using Social Security earnings linked to the Current Population Survey. From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, there is a strong negative trend in earnings volatility driven by a decline in transitory variance. From the mid-1990s, there is relative stability in trends of male earnings volatility due to an increase in the variance of permanent shocks. Cohort analyses indicate that earnings volatility is U-shaped, driven by large permanent shocks early and later in the life cycle.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | S55-S82 |
| Journal | Journal of Labor Economics |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue number | S1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 The University of Chicago. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits non-commercial reuse of the work with attribution. For commercial use, contact [email protected].
Funding
We thank participants at the 2022 Conference in Honor of Robert Moffitt at Johns Hopkins University, the 2023 Federal Statistical Research Data Conference in Kansas City, seminar participants at Trinity College London, Jonathan Eggleston, Cheryl Grim, and Sonya Porter for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Blundell is grateful for financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (grant ES/T014334/1). Bollinger and Ziliak are grateful for the financial support of the National Science Foundation (grant 1918828). The linked Annual Social and Economic Supplement–Detailed Earnings Record data used in this project were obtained as part of an internal-to-census project (DMS 7503840) and analyzed in a secure federal facility at the Kentucky Research Data Center in Lexington. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the US Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has ensured appropriate access and use of confidential data and has reviewed these results for disclosure avoidance protection (project 7503840: CBDRB-FY22-CES010-021; CBDRB-FY22-CES004-046; CBDRB-FY23-081; CBDRB-FY24-0108). Contact the corresponding author, Richard W. Blundell, at [email protected] . Information concerning access to the data used in this paper is available in a zip file .
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Economic and Social Research Council | ES/T014334/1 |
| National Science Foundation Arctic Social Science Program | 1918828 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Industrial relations
- Economics and Econometrics