In this paper, I examine a new approach for measuring earnings quality, defined as the closeness of reported earnings to “permanent earnings,” based on firm decisions with regard to capital and labor investments. Specifically, I measure earnings quality as the contemporaneous association between changes in the levels of capital and labor investment and the change in reported earnings. This appr...

Long Term Earnings Inequality, Earnings Instability and Temporary Employment in Spain: 1993–2000 This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel, cross-sectional...

Accurate projections of lifetime earnings are useful in projecting Social Security benefits, trust fund balances, and economic resources of the elderly and the effects of changes in Social Security policy. This article projects lifetime Social Security earnings until retirement using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) matched to Social Security records of annual ear...

Earnings non-synchronicity captures the extent to which firm-specific factors determine a firm’s earnings, and has important implications to a firm’s information environment. Prior research shows that high earnings non-synchronicity impedes corporate outsiders’ information processing. Given managers generally possess superior information about their firms’ unique operating and reporting strateg...

In order to assess the effect of Social Security reform on current and future workers, it is essential to accurately characterize the initial situations of representative workers affected by reform. For the purpose of analyzing typical reforms, the most important characteristic of a worker is the level and pattern of his or her preretirement earnings. Under the current system, pensions are dete...

This study estimates the earnings losses associated with workplace injuries that lead to permanent partial disability. Using unique administrative data from California, injured workers are matched to their co-workers with similar pre-injury earnings. Earnings loss is estimated as the difference in earnings between these two groups following injury. It is found that earnings losses are large. Mo...

This article presents replacement rates based on actual earnings for persons first receiving Social Security retired-worker benefits in the early 1980’s. One of the advantages of actual earnings replacement rates is that they reflect the complexities of real-life workers. Because there is no well-established procedure to calculate actual rates, several alternative definitions are used to show t...