Like most downturns, the Great Recession has been particularly hard on low-skilled workers. While one potential explanation posits that this reflects the cyclical nature of industries and occupations that employ many low-skilled workers, another points to the ability of unemployed high-skilled workers to take middle- and low-skilled jobs during the downturn. For example, over the past five years, employment in middle-skilled occupations has fallen for less-educated workers, while simultaneously rising for workers with college degrees.
Since the pioneering work of Mark Granovetter, sociologists and other social scientists have investigated the role of social networks (or social capital) in finding jobs. Results point to the powerful influence that social relationships have in matching people with jobs. Recent research in labor economics also shows that finding jobs through informal contacts such as friends, relatives, and other acquaintances is widespread.
Five years after the end of the Great Recession, unemployment remains high. And, of the 9.8 million people currently unemployed, 3.5 million are long-term unemployed. The long-term unemployed face significant risks and disadvantages—from loss of earnings, to the deterioration of skills, increased rates of poverty, increased likelihood of divorce, and poor physical and mental health outcomes. How does the likelihood of finding a job change as the duration of unemployment increases? What does this mean for government employment policies and workforce development strategies?
- November 2016: Additional funding of $34,570 awarded
Family income has a powerful effect in shaping child well-being—multiple disciplines have documented significant and positive correlations between family income and child outcomes, including various academic, behavioral, psychological, and health indicators. Despite these associations, it is unclear whether the relationships are causal because family income is endogenous to a host of difficult-to-measure parental characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, habits and values.
Jointly funded with the Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Rising levels of economic inequality over the past four decades raise many questions about the intergenerational transmission of advantage and the effects of rising inequality on social mobility. Scholars have analyzed IRS data on earnings correlations across generations and concluded that there has been little change in income mobility in the recent past, although they document substantial geographic variation in mobility.
There have been dramatic workforce changes over the last forty years as women’s labor force participation has increased. Many of these workers have unpaid caregiving responsibilities for family members, young and old. A growing, but still small, number of workplaces have adopted work-life balance (WLB) practices to address their changing workforce. Such practices include flexibility about when one works, where one works, or how much one works, as well as policies regarding child- and family-care leave.
New evidence shows that children display substantial class-based gaps in both cognitive and non-cognitive skills by the time they enter kindergarten. Can expanded or universal pre-K mediate those gaps? State-funded pre-K doubled the percentage of 4-year olds served in the decade between 2001 and 2011, from 14% to 28%, but those numbers mask great variation across states. While ten states have no publicly funded pre-K programs, others primarily serve low-income students. Still others, like Oklahoma, have implemented nearly universal pre-K.