The Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy hosts Professor Arindrajit Dube for the first talk in the Fall 2022 Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar Series. Professor Dube will discuss his paper, “The Unexpected Compression: Employment and Wage Trends Before and After the Pandemic,” co-authored with Professor David Autor. This seminar will be preceded by a welcome-back lunch for the Stone Program community in the Allison Dining Room at 11:30am.
Arindrajit Dube is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work focuses on labor economics, along with health economics, public finance, and political economy. He received a B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Development Policy from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has held positions of visiting Professor at MIT Department of Economics, and Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He is also currently a research associate at NBER and a research fellow at IZA.
“The Unexpected Compression: Employment and Wage Trends Before and After the Pandemic”
Abstract: We present evidence that labor market tightness following the pandemic led to an increase in labor market competition. Even though low-wage jobs were hit particularly hard during the pandemic, the subsequent rebound led to an unexpected compression in the wage distribution. Wages have been rising the fastest at the bottom, and slowest at the top—the opposite of what we have observed for much of the past four decades—yielding a fall in the college wage premium and a compression of wage inequality. This pattern is accompanied by a sharp increase in job-to-job separations, which are associated with rapid nominal wage growth for non-college workers. The change in separations have been much higher at jobs paying particularly low wages, leading to a doubling of the wage-separations elasticity, a measure of competition in the labor market. Wage growth among job-stayers is far less pronounced. (co-authored with David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics, MIT)
Arindrajit Dube (Professor of Economics, UMass Amherst)
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-495-1100
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