Labor Market Dynamics During the 1940s

本项目旨在了解导致普通美国工人在20世纪中叶繁荣的环境，以确定当前的劳动力市场是否以及如何重新焕发活力。该项目重点关注20世纪40年代，这是20世纪30年代大萧条和50年代和60年代持续增长之间的重要过渡十年。即使在1945年第二次世界大战结束后，失业率和收入不平等仍然很低，工资增长仍然很高。为了了解20世纪中期工人的成功，研究者从历史调查中创建了一个新的数据集，该数据集记录了1940年至1950年间数千名工人的就业、失业、职业历史和地理迁移。有了这些新数据，研究者将追踪许多不同类型的个人的经历，包括平民、退伍军人、移民等，以了解美国经济如何从20世纪30年代的“长期停滞”上升到繁荣的50年代和60年代。这项研究收集了新的数据，以研究20世纪40年代美国劳动力市场的动态。这十年代表了从20世纪30年代的“长期停滞”到20世纪50年代和60年代的持续增长道路的重要转变。该项目的目标是：(i)理解为什么20世纪40年代的事件导致了失业和不平等的持久变化；（ii）描述使劳动力市场能够快速有效地重新分配工人的因素，尽管历史上行业需求发生了一些最大的变化；（三）分析哪些因素帮助个人在职业和收入阶梯上向上移动。该项目最重要的部分是利用档案资源构建一个新的工人层面的纵向数据集，包括1940年至1950年的就业、失业和非就业时期。这些资源还包含丰富的人口统计和劳动力市场细节。将使用现代纵向数据来源，如收入动态小组研究，对20世纪40年代工人的经历与近代工人的经历进行比较。

This project seeks to understand the circumstances that led average American workers to prosper during the middle third of the 20th Century in order to determine whether and how the current labor market might be reinvigorated. The project focuses on the 1940s, which was an important transition decade between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the sustained growth of the 1950s and 1960s. Even after World War II ended in 1945, unemployment and income inequality remained low and wage growth remained high. To understand the success of workers during the mid-20th Century, the investigator creates a new data set from historical surveys that record the employment, unemployment, occupational histories, and geographic moves for thousands of individual workers from 1940 through 1950. With the new data, the investigator will track the experiences of many different types of individuals, including civilians, veterans, immigrants, etc. in order to understand how the U.S. economy rose from the "secular stagnation" of the 1930s to the prosperous 1950s and 1960s.This research gathers new data in order to study U.S. labor market dynamics during the 1940s. This decade represented an important transition from the "secular stagnation" of the 1930s to the sustained growth path of the 1950s and 1960s. The goals of the project are (i) to understand why the events of the 1940s led to lasting changes in unemployment and inequality; (ii) to characterize the factors that allowed the labor market to reallocate workers quickly and efficiently despite some of the biggest shifts in sectoral demand in history; and (iii) to analyze which factors helped individuals move up the occupation and earnings ladder. The most important part of the project is the use of archival sources to construct a new worker-level longitudinal dataset of employment, unemployment, and non-employment spells from 1940 through 1950. These sources also contain rich demographic and labor market detail. Comparisons will be made between the experiences of workers during the 1940s to those from more recent times, using modern longitudinal data sources such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.