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We examine the cardinal gap between wage distributions of the incumbents and newly hired workers based on entropic distances which are well-defined welfare theoretic measures. Decomposition of several effects is achieved by identifying several counterfactual distributions of different groups. These go beyond the usual Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions at the (linear) conditional means. Much like quantiles, these entropic distances are well-defined inferential objects and functions whose statistical properties have recently been developed. Going beyond these strong rankings and distances, we consider weak uniform ranking of these wage outcomes based on statistical tests for stochastic dominance. The empirical analysis is focused on employees with at least 35 hours of work in the 1996–2012 monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). Among others, we find incumbent workers enjoy a better distribution of wages, but the attribution of the gap to wage inequality and human capital characteristics varies between quantiles. For instance, highly paid new workers are mainly due to human capital components, and in some years, even better wage structure.

This study examines the effect of a Medicaid disenrollment on employment, sources of health insurance coverage, and health and health care utilization of childless adults using longitudinal data from the 2004 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. From July to September 2005, TennCare, the Tennessee Medicaid program, disenrolled approximately 170,000 adults following a change in eligibility rules. Following this eligibility change, the fraction of adults in Tennessee covered by Medicaid fell by over 5 percentage points while uninsured rates increased by almost 5 percentage points relative to adults in other Southern states. There is no evidence of an increase in employment rates in Tennessee following the disenrollment. Self-reported health and access to medical care worsened as hospitalization rates, doctor visits, and dentist visits all declined while the use of free or public clinics increased. The Tennessee experience suggests that undoing the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to adults that occurred under the Affordable Care Act likely would reduce health insurance coverage, reduce health care access, and worsen health but would not lead to increases in employment.

It is well-known that the majority of women work in a limited number of occupations characterized by a proportionately high number of female workers. Moreover, workers in these female-dominated (FD) occupations earn less, on average, than workers in traditionally male or integrated occupations (McPherson & Hirsch, 1995). This occupational wage differential is widely accepted as a partial explanation for the pervasive gender wage-differential. However, it is unclear why an individual would enter into a FD occupation if the wages are lower than in nonfemale-dominated (NFD) occupations. It is also unclear if women who choose FD occupations could earn more in occupations that are NFD. Therefore, attributing a portion of the gender wage differential to occupational differences may be incorrect. Indeed, differences in the occupational choices of men and women will only explain the wage differential between genders if females in FD occupations could expect to earn higher wages elsewhere.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of individual social capital characteristics in determining wages, both directly through their valuation by employers and indirectly through their impact on individual occupational choice. We find that a person’s level of sociability and care for others works through both channels to explain wage differences between social and nonsocial occupations. Additionally, expected wages in each occupation type are found to be at least as important as a person’s level of social capital in choosing a social occupation. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

This volume is devoted to a number of multifaceted issues regarding worker well-being. Of the 15 chapters, the first two are the most general, dealing with overall earnings distribution and overall changes in welfare policy. The remaining chapters examine specific aspects of human welfare. They cover fertility, disability, minimum wage, pension wealth, human capital investment, migration, health, and earnings. The book culminates with four chapters relating to gender and the family. Ultimately, determining who works, how much is earned, and how these earnings get distributed define the components of individual and social welfare. The topics covered in this volume shed light on these questions.

Who works, how much one works, and what one earns are the cornerstones of labor economics. However, determining the answers to these questions can be tricky because many factors are involved in estimating labor supply, explaining the implications of labor demand, and determining the resulting earnings. This volume contains 13 chapters on these components of the labor market. Five deal directly with labor supply; four deal with labor demand, most notably the effect of cyclical demand fluctuations; and the remaining four deal with compensation, particularly wages, wage distributions, and fringe benefits.