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Labor force composition and underemployment trends, 1969–1980

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Abstract

Underemployment indicators are both ‘objective’ indicators of individual well-being and social welfare and ‘normative’ indicators for programmatic use. Components of an underemployment indicator framework, the Labor Utilization Framework (LUF), are operationally defined and shown to be closely related to a family of proposed alternatives. Using CPS data, a 12-year time series of LUF indicators is developed for the U.S. labor force and its key subgroups. The across-time heterogeneity of the labor force is analyzed in relation to a ‘basic’ demographic group-by-LUF-by-time contingency, showing how the complexity of labor force structure that emerges from a multi-state indicator of underemployment can be rigorously modeled. Standard loglinear models, which focus on the temporal aspects of data from repeated cross-sectional surveys, provide the analytic technique. Changes in the demographic composition of the labor force account for about 30% of the overall period variability, and age structure has made the most important contribution to the compositional change.

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Authors
  1. Clifford C. Clogg
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  2. Teresa A. Sullivan
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Additional information

The first author was supported in part by research contract NSF SES-7823759 from the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation. The work of the second author was supported in part by NICHD Grant No. HD 06160-11A1. The authors are indebted to Mu C. Chang for programming assistance and to Harley L. Browning, Otis Dudley Duncan, William H. Form, Randy Hodson, Daniel T. Lichter, and James W. Shockey for helpful comments. Sherry Young typed the manuscript.

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Clogg, C.C., Sullivan, T.A. Labor force composition and underemployment trends, 1969–1980. Social Indicators Research 12, 117–152 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00318232

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