We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...

The possible existence of trends in volatility in the U.S. labor market has been an important issue in both labor economics and macroeconomics. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has been the workhorse data set used to estimate trends in earnings volatility at the individual level....

As part of a set of papers using the same methods and sample selection criteria to estimate trends in male earnings volatility across a number of survey and administrative datasets, we conduct a new investigation of trends in male earnings volatility from the 1980s to 2014 using data from the...