I have a new paper in Social Science Quarterly with my collaborators Dave Sjoquist and Sally Wallace at Georgia State University. This paper compares earnings mobility for low-wage workers before and after the Great Recession using linked administrative data from the state of Georgia. This work utilizes our mobilityIndexR R package to estimate transition matrices and calculate mobility indices i.e. measures of mobility. Click here for an introduction to the package.

Abstract:

We calculate earnings mobility indices for low-wage workers for 7-year periods to explore the differences in mobility between the pre- and post-Great Recession periods. We find that mobility is greater in the post-Great Recession period. We also calculate three-year mobility indices for the period 2000 – 2015 and find that there is substantial variation in mobility indices in the post- 2007 period. We also find that the variation in three-year mobility indices over the period 2000 - 2015 is closely related to the unemployment rate.

The preprint is available here.