As we approach this Labor Day, the Pennsylvania economy is growing steadily. Working families are sharing in prosperity in a more sustained way than at any point since 1980--although many families still struggle to make ends meet and, in our polarized nation, a big partisan divide exists in perceptions of whether the economy is better than four…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented economic and policy challenges to the United States and other countries. Navigating out of the pandemic slowdown is another novel experience, which makes it more difficult to answer the question addressed each year in the "State of Working Pennsylvania": How is the Pennsylvania economy…

The United States and Pennsylvania economies are at a pivot point: Will we build forward better or will we build back the same? Will we make things even worse? This report revisits the policy choices that lie ahead. Most of this annual checkup on the Pennsylvania economy, the 26th "State of Working Pennsylvania," presents labor market…

Tom Wilson, the chair of the executive committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published an op-ed titled "Save Capitalism by Paying People More." Wilson acknowledges in blunt terms that ordinary working Americans are not flourishing economically. This year's annual "The State of Working Pennsylvania" documents the accuracy of…

Empirical evidence on the effects of compensation reform is somewhat scarce. Most U.S. public school teachers are paid according to rigid schedules that determine pay based solely on seniority and academic credentials. In unionized school districts, these schedules are set by collective bargaining agreements. In 2011 when the Wisconsin state…

Business schools frequently utilize AACSB's Salary Survey ("Staff Compensation and Demographic Survey," or the "SCDS Report") to benchmark salaries being offered by other schools. While providing averages based on a national sample, the "SCDS Report" obscures differences that might exist in salary averages between…

"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2022" centered on the continued recovery from the COVID-19 recession, highlighting that Pennsylvania was at a policy crossroads: would political leaders embrace policies to strengthen the individual and collective worker power evident a year ago? Or would austerity and anti-worker policies after the…

We use vocational training curricula to investigate how IT skills are trained within broader "skills packages" and how these relate to labour market outcomes. Skills packages are the typical combinations of IT skills (e.g., CNC) and technical or nontechnical skills (e.g., material sciences or work safety) that are jointly required in the…

Better-educated workers form many more long-distance job matches, and they move more quickly following local employment shocks. I argue this is a consequence of larger dispersion in wage offers, independent of geography. In a frictional market, this generates larger surpluses for workers in new matches, which can better justify the cost of moving…

Across the OECD, the labour-market performance of foreign-born-adults tends to lag behind that of the native-born. Immigrants are not only more likely to be unemployed or inactive, but they also earn less and work in lower-skilled jobs. Differences in skills proficiency, language spoken and country of education explain a large part--albeit not the…

"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2018," Keystone Research Center's 23rd annual review of the Pennsylvania economy and labor market finds that, nearly a decade into the current national economic expansion, many Pennsylvania workers are still waiting for a raise. The report points to three factors that help explain this. First, despite…

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the United States was already deeply unequal. Before the pandemic, 140 million Americans were poor or near poor, living just one emergency above the poverty line. Inequality in the United States did not happen suddenly and cannot be explained as the consequence of individual failures; rather, decades of…

Slow job growth and a labor market still short of full employment have resulted in stagnant wages and little growth in income in Pennsylvania. In order for the majority of Pennsylvania families to see real income growth in the years ahead the state will need a combination of faster job growth and economic policies that actively seek to raise wages…

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a stark spotlight on need for digital skills among a wide swath of the American workforce. But even before the pandemic, the US labor market reflected a growing demand for workers across industries to have strong digital skills. This report uses data from a rigorously designed international assessment to analyze…

Each Labor Day the Keystone Research Center releases an annual checkup on the health of the Pennsylvania labor market, "The State of Working Pennsylvania." The 2018 edition focused on state-level data, mostly available through June 2018. This addendum to that report focuses on 2017 data released last month by the Census Bureau on incomes…