Slow Motion:Earnings Mobility of Young Workers in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper uses longitudinal data to estimate cohort changes in earnings trajectories. Among male workers turning 21 before 1980, we find that more than six in ten (60%) of all male workers and seven in ten (71%) of college-educated male workers attained earnings levels by age 30 that were at least twice the poverty line. These figures are considerably higher than the corresponding 42% and 56% fractions of workers turning 21 between 1968 and 1980. Relatively few members of the overlapping groups of blacks, men with less schooling, and men from low-SES family backgrounds succeeded in crossing the twice-poverty threshold. When compared with older cohorts, recent cohorts from all demographic subgroups we examined took longer to reach the three earnings thresholds used in our analysis.