Tag Archives: employee compensation

Rising Income Inequality: Full Employment Would Have Kept the Bottom 20% From Falling Behind

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Real Income Growth of Bottom 20% vs Unemployment Rate, 1968-2012

A.  Introduction

President Obama highlighted in this year’s State of the Union address, as well as in other recent speeches and events, the importance of and concerns about the worsening distribution of income in the US.  As this blog noted in a post two years ago, income distribution has worsened markedly in the US since about 1980, when Reagan was elected.  This deterioration since 1980 is in sharp contrast to the period from the end of World War II until 1980, when incomes of all groups in the US moved upward together.  The paths then diverged sharply after 1980, with large increases in the incomes of the rich (and in particular the extremely rich:  the top 1%, top 0.1%, and especially the top 0.01%), while the real incomes of the bottom 90% were flat or even falling.

An important question, of course, is what to do to achieve more equitable growth, and in particular more rapid growth in the real incomes of those in the lower strata of the population.  Much of the discussion has focussed on measures such as improving our educational and training systems, to prepare workers for better paying jobs.  There is no doubt that such measures are important, and need to be done.  Their impact will, however, only be over the long term – in a generation for measures such as improvements in the educational system.

This blog post will focus on a more immediate action that can be taken:  returning the economy to full employment and keeping it there.  We will find that based on historic patterns, slack in the labor market due to less than full employment has been negatively associated with growth in the real incomes of the bottom 20% of households.  Furthermore, based on statistical regression parameters estimated from the historical data, the greater degree of slack in the US labor market since 1980 compared to that in the thirty years before 1980, largely suffices in itself to account for the relative deterioration of real incomes since 1980 of the bottom 20% of households compared to the top 20%.

This is an important result.  Note that the claim is not that greater slack in the labor market (on average) in the decades since 1980 was the sole cause of the deterioration of relative incomes of the poorest 20% vs. the richest 20%.  There were undoubtedly numerous reasons for this.  But what the finding does indicate is that had the unemployment rate after 1980 matched what it had been in the three decades before 1980, this would have largely sufficed in itself to offset the other factors, and would have led to a rate of growth in the real incomes of the bottom 20% close to what it was for the top 20%.

B.  The Relationship Between Real Income Growth of the Bottom 20% and the Unemployment Rate

The scatter diagram at the top of this post shows the relationship between the annual real income growth of the bottom 20% of households since 1968, and the average rate of unemployment in the same year.  The income data for the bottom 20% comes from the series produced by the US Census Bureau, and measures household cash income before tax and from all cash sources (so it will include Social Security, for example, but not payments under Medicare).  The series starts in 1967 (so 1968 is the first year for which one can compute the growth), and goes to 2012.  The unemployment rate comes from the standard series produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, where the annual rate is the simple average of the monthly rates over the year.

The scatter diagram suggests there is a relationship between slack in the labor market (a higher unemployment rate) and the annual change in the real incomes of the bottom 20% of households, but that it is by no means a tight one.  Other factors matter as well.  But a simple ordinary least squares regression of the annual change in the real incomes of the bottom 20% against the average unemployment rate in that year, does suggest that the unemployment rate is an important and statistically significant factor.

The regression fitted line slopes downward with a coefficient of -0.8228, indicating that on average, a 1% point increase in the unemployment rate in the year will be associated with a 0.8228% point fall in the growth rate that year of the real incomes of the bottom 20%.  The t-statistic on the 0.8228 slope coefficient is 3.3, where any t-statistic greater than about 2.0 is generally seen as statistically significant (with a greater than 95% degree of confidence).  That is, with a greater than 95% degree of confidence, the results suggest that the coefficient is significantly different from zero (where zero would indicate no relationship).

The R-squared of the regression (an indication of correlation) is relatively modest at just 0.1982.  It can vary from zero to one.  This indicates that there is more than just the unemployment rate that accounts for the annual change in the real incomes of the bottom 20%.  But this does not mean that the unemployment rate does not matter.  The t-statistic for it is highly significant.  Rather, the modest R-squared indicates there are other factors as well which have not been identified here.

Similar regressions were run for the changes in the real incomes of the other quintiles of the household income groups.  The estimated coefficients became progressively closer to zero, from -0.82 for the bottom 20%, to -0.62 for the second 20%, to -0.52 for the middle 20%, to -0.47 for the fourth 20%, and then dropping sharply to -0.25 for the top 20%.  This suggests that the link to unemployment as a factor explaining the growth in the real incomes of the group became progressively less important for the richer groups.  And the t-statistic for the coefficient for the top 20% was only 1.0, indicating the estimated coefficient (of -0.25) was statistically not significantly different from zero (and hence that one cannot reject the hypothesis that no relationship is there).  The R-squareds for the regressions similarly fell steadily, from 0.1982 for the bottom 20%, to 0.19 for the second 20%, to 0.16 for the middle 20%, to 0.14 for the fourth 20%, and then dropping sharply to an extremely low 0.02 for the top 20%.

The results suggest that slackness in the labor market, as measured by the unemployment rate, was a significant factor in explaining the annual growth in the real incomes of the bottom 20% (with more unemployment leading to lower or indeed negative growth).  The results also suggest that higher unemployment did not have a statistically significant impact on the growth in real incomes of the top 20%.

C.  The Impact of Less Slack in the Labor Market

From 1950 to 1979, when growth was similar for all income groups (see this earlier blog post), the monthly unemployment rate averaged 5.17% in the US.  But from 1980 to 2012, the monthly rate averaged 6.44%, or 1.27% points higher.  The index of real incomes of the bottom 20% of households (in the US Census data cited above) had risen from 100.0 in 1967 (the earliest year with such data) to an index value of 118.9 in 1980.  But since then it has risen hardly at all, reaching only 119.5 in 2012.  The 1980 to 2012 growth rate was only 0.015% per year (note not 1.5% per year, but rather only one-hundreth of that).

Suppose the labor markets over 1980 to 2012 had been as close to full employment as they had been over the period 1950 to 1979.  Applying the estimated regression coefficient of -0.8228 to the 1.27% point difference in the average unemployment rates, the annual growth rate of the real incomes of the bottom 20% would have been 1.045% points higher (equal to 0.8228 x 1.27% points), and hence would have reached a growth rate of 1.06% a year (equal to 1.045% + 0.015%).  With such a growth rate, the real incomes of the bottom 20% would have reached an index value of 166.5 in 2012  This would have been close to the index value of the real incomes of the top 20% in that year of 169.8 (with 1967 set equal to 100.0).  Relative incomes would have grown similarly since 1967, and inequality (for the bottom 20% compared to the top 20%) would not have grown.

This is an interesting result.  It suggests that the higher unemployment rates we have on average suffered from since 1980 can account both for the stagnation of the real incomes of the bottom 20%, and the increasing inequality when comparing this group to the top 20%.  Note it does not offset all of the increasing inequality seen since Reagan was elected.  The real incomes of the top 1%, top 0.1%, and especially the top 0.01% have grown by far more than the incomes of the top 20%.  But keeping up with the top 20% would still be a major accomplishment.

A return to the economic performance that the US enjoyed in the three decades before Reagan would not be impossible.  To keep the average unemployment rate at the 5.17% rate achieved between 1950 and 1979 would not mean that all recessions need be avoided.  There were a number of recessions in the three decades before 1980.  But the recessions since 1980 (dating from January 1980 at the end of the Carter Administration, from July 1981 at the beginning of Reagan, from July 1990 during Bush I, from March 2001 at the beginning of Bush II and December 2007 at the end of Bush II) have been especially severe.  Avoiding those high peak rates of unemployment would have brought down the average.  Specifically, the average unemployment rate (based on the monthly figures) over 1980 to 2012 would have matched the 1950 to 1979 average if one would have been able to avoid those months since 1980 when the unemployment rate reached 6.4% or more.

D.  Conclusion

There is increasing recognition that the rise in inequality in the decades since 1980, and the stagnation since then in the real incomes of those in the lower strata of the population, cannot go on.  But the solutions commonly proposed, such as better education and training, will take decades to have an impact.

The analysis in this post indicates that the more immediate action of bringing the economy back to full employment and then keeping it close to full employment, would have a major positive impact on the real incomes of those in the bottom 20% of households, and would lead to a more equitable distribution.  The analysis suggests that had the unemployment rate over 1980 to 2012 been at the level achieved over 1950 to 1979, then the rate of income growth of the bottom 20% since 1980 would have been similar to that of the top 20%.  The higher rate of unemployment since 1980, on average, may well explain why growth was broadly equal among income groups in the three decades before 1980, but not in the three decades since.

While there are many factors that underlie income growth and distributional changes, particularly for those at the very top of the income distribution (the top 1% and higher), the results suggest that getting the economy back to full employment should be seen as critically important and valuable.  And there is no mystery in how to do this:  As earlier posts on this blog have noted, the fiscal drag from government cutbacks since 2009 can fully explain why full employment has yet to be achieved in this recovery.  Had government been spending been allowed to grow simply at its historical average rate, the economy would already have returned to full employment by now.  Had government spending been allowed to grow at the higher rate it had under Reagan, the US would likely have been back at full employment in 2011 or early 2012.

Unemployment matters.  Not only is it a direct and personal tragedy for those who have lost a job because of the macro mismanagement of the economy, it is also a waste of resources for the economy.  The evidence reviewed in this post suggests further that the greater degree of slack in the US labor market since 1980 may well explain the stagnation of real incomes of the poorer strata of the population, and the widening degree of inequality of recent decades for those other than in the extreme upper strata.

ObamaCare Has Not Led to a Shift of Employees From Full-Time to Part-Time Work

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Part-Time Employment #2 as Share of Total Employment, Jan 2007 to Sept 2013

Conservative media have repeatedly asserted that due to ObamaCare (formally the Affordable Care Act), there has been and will be a big shift of workers from full-time to part-time status.  Publications such as Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and of course Fox News, have asserted that this is a fact and a necessary consequence of ObamaCare.  The argument is that since ObamaCare will require employers to include health care benefits as part of the wage compensation package to full time employees (defined as those who normally work more than 30 hours a week for the firm), firms will have the incentive, and by competition the necessity, of shifting workers to part-time status.  It is argued that instead of employing three workers for 40 hours each (for 120 employee hours), firms will instead employ four part time workers at just below 30 hours each to obtain the 120 employee hours.

There are a number of problems with this argument.  First, the ObamaCare requirements for health coverage only apply to firms with more than 50 full time employees.  There is no change for firms employing fewer than 50 workers.  Second, almost all of the firms in the US with more than 50 employees, and indeed a majority also of the workers in firms of fewer than 50 employees, are already in firms that provide health insurance coverage for their workers.   Specifically, 97% of the workers in firms with more than 50 employees are in firms offering health insurance coverage as part of their wage compensation package.  ObamaCare will require this (to avoid a per worker penalty) to go from 97% to 100%, which is not a big change.  And even though ObamaCare will not have such a requirement for firms employing fewer than 50 workers, it is already the case that 53% of the workers in such firms are in firms providing health insurance coverage.   Firms provide health insurance coverage as part of the total compensation package they pay their employees both because they have a direct interest in having healthy workers, but also because there are tax and financial advantages to doing so.

Notwithstanding these issues, the conservative media and Republican politicians continue to assert that ObamaCare is leading to a large substitution of part-time for full-time workers.  But as Jason Furman, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House has recently noted, this is not seen in the data.  The graph at the top of this blog post is one way to look at this data.

The graph shows the share of part-time workers (part time for economic reasons and not part time by choice) in all workers, by month, for the period from January 2007 to September 2013.  The data come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  If ObamaCare is leading to a large shift of workers from full-time to part-time status, then this ratio would be rising since ObamaCare was passed or at some more recent date.  But it is not.

The share of part-time workers in all workers rose in the last year of the Bush administration due to the economic crisis, from about 3% before to about 6 1/2% after.  It was rising rapidly as Obama took office, but stabilized soon thereafter as the economy began to stabilize with the passage of Obama’s stimulus package and aggressive actions by the Fed.  Since then the ratio has trended downwards, albeit slowly.  As has been noted previously in this blog, the continued fiscal drag from government expenditure cuts since 2010 has held back the economy and hence the recovery in the job market.  The blog post noted that if government spending had simply been allowed to grow at its long term average rate, we would likely have already returned to full employment (and would have returned to full employment in 2011, if government expenditures had been allowed to rise at the same pace as they had during the Reagan years).

The Affordable Care Act was signed by Obama in March 2010.  As the graph above indicates, there was no sharp change in trend once that act was signed.  If anything, the share of part-time workers in all workers then began to decline from a previous steady level.  Such a response is the opposite of what the conservative media and Republican politicians have asserted has been the result of ObamaCare coming into effect.

To put the figures in perspective, the graph above also shows how high the ratio of part-time workers to all workers would have had to jump, had either just 5% (the square point) or 10% (the round point) of full-time workers been substituted for by an equal number of part-time workers, additional to where the September 2013 ratio in fact was.   An equal number is used between the full-time and part-time workers to be conservative in the estimate.  The argument being made by the critics is in fact that a higher number of part-time workers would have been hired to substitute for the full-time workers let go, to get the same number of working hours.  But even with an equal number being substituted, such a shift of 5% of the workers would have led to rise in the ratio by 74% relative to where it was in September 2013, and a shift of 10% would have led to a rise of 148%.  One does not see anything like this.

It is not known what the paths would have been to reach those 5% or 10% shifts, but the resulting changes in the paths would have been obvious.  Such changes did not occur.  Since one is comparing the figures to what otherwise would have been the case, the conservative critics would need to argue that the ratio of part-time to all workers would have plummeted in the absence of ObamaCare.  There is no reason given on why this would have been so.  Furthermore, for the case of a 10% shift the number of part-time workers would have had to be negative in the absence of ObamaCare, which is of course impossible.

There is simply no evidence to support the assertion in the conservative media that ObamaCare is leading a significant share of firms to shift workers from full-time to part-time status.

The Stagnation Over the Last Half Century of the Real Minimum Wage Is Even Worse Than It Looks: But May Not Be Easy to Solve

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Real Min Wage Under Alternative Scenarios, 1950-2012

A.  Introduction

The previous post on this blog looked at whether the periodic increases in the minimum wage since 1950 in the US had led to jumps in unemployment of those workers making the minimum wage.  It concluded that there was no evidence of higher unemployment resulting from the changes of the magnitude observed.  And this was found whether by simply examining what happened to unemployment in the months following those sporadic increases, or in more rigorous econometric studies that have been undertaken over the last two decades.

That blog post noted that despite those sporadic increases in the nominal minimum wage, the minimum wage in real, inflation adjusted, terms had still fallen significantly over the last half century.  The minimum wage, in terms of today’s prices, had averaged about $9 per hour over the 25 years 1956-80 inclusive, and had reached a peak of $10.82 in February 1968.  Yet the minimum wage is only $7.25 today.  President Obama proposed to Congress in his State of the Union address that the minimum wage be raised to $9.00.  This would be a modest goal, as it would bring it back only to a level of a half century ago.  During that half century, US per capita GDP has more than doubled.  Yet even that modest increase has been strongly criticized by Republican leaders and conservatives.

B.  Two Scenarios

Staying flat in real terms is an exceedingly limited goal.  One would expect growth in a growing economy.  And at $9.00 an hour, a full time worker (40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year with no vacation) would still be earning almost 20% less than the poverty line for a family of four.  It is therefore of interest to ask what would the minimum wage be today if it were not simply flat in real terms, but had grown along with the rest of the economy?

The graph above shows two scenarios.  One is where the minimum wage would have grown at the same pace as overall labor productivity growth, and the other is where the minimum wage would have grown at the same pace as real compensation has for all workers.

There are several points worth noting.  First, it is very interesting that over the period 1950 to 1968, one finds that labor productivity, real compensation of all workers, and (with more jumpiness) the real minimum wage, all tracked basically the same path.  This is as one would expect in a normal growing economy.  Productivity grows, real wages grow at a similar rate (implying that profits will also grow at a similar rate), and similar increases in the real minimum wage will not create difficulties.

But the trends then diverged.  The minimum wage, set by government policy, was not allowed to keep up with inflation, leading to a significant fall in real terms.  The deterioration in the real minimum wage was especially sharp and steady during the presidencies of Richard Nixon (1969-74), Reagan (1981-88, and carrying over into 1989) and George W. Bush (2001-2007).  By June 2007, the minimum wage had reached a low of $5.75 (in terms of today’s prices) – lower than at any other point in time since before 1950 (I did not look at earlier data than this).  The real minimum wage was $7.38 in January 1950, during the presidency of Harry Truman.  It was 22% less in 2007, 57 years later.

C.  The Divergence Since the 1980s Between Growth in Labor Productivity and Growth in Labor Compensation

Labor productivity and real compensation of all workers continued to track each other for a few years after 1968.  But then some divergence started to open up in the mid-1970s, and this divergence began to grow sharply from about 1982/83.  It has continued since.

This divergence between productivity growth and real compensation of workers since the 1980s has been noted and discussed before in this blog.  It was noted there that the changes that occurred during the Reagan presidency, while lauded by conservatives, in fact did not lead to overall faster growth in output or productivity (growth in output and in productivity have in fact been slower since the Reagan presidency than it was before).  But the changes that began during the Reagan term did lead to sharply slower growth in real wages, and led as well to a far worse distribution of income.  The rich, and especially the very rich (the top 1%, and even more so the top 0.1% and 0.01%) have done extremely well since 1980.  But as that blog post showed, the real incomes of the bottom 90% have grown only modestly (and almost solely in the second half of the 1990s, during Clinton’s term).

By 2012, the average real compensation of all workers was fully one-third less than what it would have been had it grown after 1968 at the same pace as labor productivity growth.  This is not a small difference.

The causes for this divergence between labor productivity growth and real compensation of workers, largely since 1982/83, are not all known.  Policy was clearly an important part of it.  One policy was that of allowing the minimum wage to fall in real terms, which pulled down the wages of not only those at the minimum wage, but also the wages of those some distance above the minimum wage as the minimum wage affects the whole lower end of the wage structure.  Reagan’s policies to undermine the ability of labor unions to bargain for higher wages were also a factor.  Government policies to keep down the wages of government workers would also have contributed.

But in addition to such policy factors, there were technological and other economic issues that probably contributed.  As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in their recent book, Race Against the Machine, the high rate of change in computer and communications technology, and the accompanying growth in robotics, not only diminished the demand for many middle class jobs such on the automobile production lines, but also for middle class jobs such as accountants, clerks, and other skilled positions where rules are followed which a computer can be programmed to do.  This same technological change in computers and communications also enabled globalization of production.  And the changes made possible by the new technologies led to the development of more and more “winner-take-all” sectors, where a few winners at the top can supply the whole market, leaving little for the rest.

D.  Could the Minimum Wage be Raised to Match?

As the graph above shows, had the minimum wage continued to grow after 1968 at the same pace as overall labor productivity grew (as it had before 1968), it would have reached $24 an hour by 2012.  Had it grown even at the slower pace that overall compensation of workers had grown, it would have reached $16 an hour.  But I would not advocate increasing the minimum wage today to $24 an hour, or even $16 an hour.  While the previous blog post had noted that changes in the minimum wage of a magnitude seen in the past had not led to higher unemployment, I am not so sure this would hold if the current minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) were more than doubled or tripled.  Without more data, I would indeed be wary of a rise in the minimum wage to more than perhaps $11 or $12 an hour.

One possible approach might therefore be as follows.  To start, one would raise the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour now, as Obama has proposed.  Obama has then also proposed to index this rate to inflation, so that one does not again see the regression in real terms observed repeatedly in the past.  But this would be too modest.  One would raise the rate to $9.00 an hour now, then to $10 a year later, then to $11 a year after that, and so on.  At each step, one would observe what the effects are.  If the impact on employment of minimum wage workers is modest, one would continue.  At some point one would start to observe significant adverse impacts, and at that point one would stop or even move back a step.

The fact that raising the minimum wage to $24 an hour now, or even to $16 an hour, is considered unimaginable, and indeed would likely lead to significant adverse employment impacts, is telling.  Something fundamentally flawed has developed in the economy which the US did not see before the 1980s.  And it does such harm for the working poor that even a full time worker at the minimum wage will still earn well less than the poverty line income.  There is a clear need to understand this better, but that should not keep us from following a more active approach, such as the step by step process suggested above, until we do.