Income Distribution Commons^™

The Dynamics Of Unskilled Wages: Analyses Of Earnings Instability And Trends In The Low-Skill Labor Market In The United States, Michael Mamo

Dissertations

This dissertation is an econometric analysis of the earnings trends and instability for less-skilled workers during the 1970s through the 1990s. The study is divided into two major sections, dealing, respectively, with a longitudinal study of earnings instability and a time-series analysis of the trends in less-skilled wages.

In the first section, the empirical autocovariance structure of earnings is parameterized and estimated using the generalized method o f moments (GMM). The analysis of longitudinal earnings data indicates that unskilled earnings had become unstable during most o f the sample period particularly during the 1980s, despite the long economic expansion that …