Real Earnings of Full-Time Workers by Education, Age Group and Sex, 1974–2012

Abstract

This note rearranges the data from Census Bureau Personal Income (PINC) tables 32–35 showing earnings of full-time, year-round workers from 1974 to 2012 to display the 39-year time series for average real earnings by education, age group, and sex. Aggregated data show strong upward trends for all males and all females combined, for males and females with a bachelor's degree or more and for those with less than a bachelor's degree. However, all trends have flattened or become negative since 2000. Shifts in the composition of the work force over time mean that trends in aggregated earnings incorporate those shifts, so may not be useful for projecting earnings growth for any individual plaintiff of a specific age and educational background. The note addresses that problem in two ways: First it re-weights the aggregate statistics to remove some effects of shifts in composition of the workforce. Second it gives summary statistics for log-linear regressions of real earnings on time for all education-age-sex combinations for the period 1974–1999 and for 2000–2012. Growth for the latter period is negative for most of those combinations. Supplemental material for a Microsoft Excel workbook contains the underlying data and several figures and is accessible from the Journal of Forensic Economics website.