Structural changes in the United States economy and labor market outcome differences between groups

This dissertation consists of two separate manuscripts examining the effects of structural changes in the U.S. labor market on the labor market success of workers. The first manuscript considers the effects of job movements between metropolitan subregions. Much previous work has considered the possibility that the movement of jobs out of central cities and into the expanding suburbs characterizing the last several decades has disadvantaged central-city residents in the labor market and that this advantage has fallen disproportionately (or perhaps exclusively) on minority populations. The manuscript offers new evidence on the evolution of such “spatial mismatches” during the 1970s and the 1980s. Using a unique data set in which metropolitan subregions are geographically matched across these decades, it directly examines the relationship between geographic variations in job growth and geographic variations in wage and employment rate growth. The primary finding is that relative job growth in a given metropolitan subregion confers a labor market advantage on the residents of that subregion, both in terms of increased nominal wage rates and increased employment probabilities. This advantage is significant for nearly all broad demographic groups, but it is highest for relatively less-educated workers and blacks.; The second manuscript examines the causes of women's relative wage improvements in the U.S. during the last 3 decades. The manuscript lays out a theoretical model of the distribution of male and female workers among occupations and the relative wages paid to those occupations; it then relates this model to the distinction between demand shifts that may have benefited women and individual improvements women may have made. An empirical analysis follows that uses the insights of the model to perform a series of decompositions attributing women's gains in different time periods to different factors. It finds that women's gains are due primarily to improvements in women's characteristics in the workplace, including significant amounts of occupational upgrading. It finds no evidence that labor demand shifts favoring women contributed to women's wage gains, although such demand shifts help explain the concentration of those wage gains in the 1980s.