How does caregiving impact employment and earnings?

This is the question that a recent NBER working paper by Nicole Maestas, Matt Messel, and Yulya Truskinovsky (2023) aim to answer. The authors use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) among individual report providing unpaid care to family and friend. The SIPP data are then linked to earnings data from…

Calculating Multifactor Productivity

What is multifactor productivity? Multifactor productivity (MFP) is a measure of real output per combined unit of labor and capital, reflecting the contributions of all factors of production.  A change in multifactor productivity reflects the change in output that cannot be accounted for by the change in combined inputs. As a result, multifactor productivity measures…

Job Stretch

In this blog, I have frequently discussed the concept of Job Lock.  Job Lock occurs when you don’t leave a job that you wish to leave (either because it is low paying or you do not like the work) simply because you do not want to lose your health insurance.  Leaving your current job for…

Are all the good men married?

Does marriage cause men’s wages to rise?  This is the question addressed by UCSD professor Kate Antonovics and Robert Town in their 2004 paper in AER cleverly titled “Are all the good men married?” It has been shown that married men earn more money than non-married men with similar characteristics.  Why is this?  A few…

Wage inequality

Many economists have noted that wage growth has not kept up with overall economic growth over the past few decades.  We observe widening wage inequality since the 1970s.  Are workers getting poorer relative to the owners of capital?  Is a communist revolution needed to equalize the playing field? Economist Martin Feldstein thinks not.   “Feldstein…

Playing sports increases your paycheck

The WSJ Real Time Economics blog reviews a paper by Michael Lechner which finds that “sports-playing adults saw a boost in income of about 1,200 euros per year over 16 years when compared to their less active peers. That translates into a 5-10% rate of return on sports activities, roughly equal to the benefit of…