Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/289755 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal for Labour Market Research [ISSN:] 2510-5027 [Volume:] 57 [Issue:] 1 [Article No.:] 30 [Year:] 2023 [Pages:] 1-24
Publisher: 
Springer, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
The article posits that the puzzles of stagnating poverty rates amidst high growth and declining unemployment in the United States can be substantially explained by polarized job markets characterized by job quality and job distribution. In recent decades, there has been an increased number of poor-quality jobs and an unequal distribution of jobs in the developed world, particularly in the United States. I have calculated measures of uneven job distribution indices that account for the distribution of jobs across households. A higher value of the uneven job distribution indices implies that there are relatively large numbers of households with multiple employed people and households with no employed people. Similarly, poor-quality jobs are those jobs that do not offer full-time work. Two-way fixed-effect models estimate that higher uneven job distribution across households worsens aggregated poverty at the state level. Similarly, good-quality jobs help households escape poverty, whereas poor-quality jobs do not. This paper suggests that eradicating poverty requires the government to direct labor market policies to be tailored more toward distributing jobs from individuals to households and altering bad jobs into good jobs, rather than merely creating more jobs in the economy. This paper contributes by elaborating on relations of employment and poverty, addressing employment quality and distribution, and providing empirical evidence.
Subjects: 
Job market polarization
Job quality
Job distribution
Poverty
Households
JEL: 
I30
E24
D19
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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