Editor’s Note: On Sunday June 28, CPA’s economics team presented “The Job Quality Index – A New Measure of Job Quality in the U.S. Labor Market” at the Western Economic Association International 95th Annual Conference. The Job Quality Index, developed by CPA in partnership with economists from Cornell University and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, provides an index measuring the quality of jobs created in the US economy since 1990.
This new study compares the JQI to established measures of the labor market including measures of unemployment, labor market participation, and real wage growth.The study finds that declining job quality, as measured by the number of jobs falling below average weekly earnings for US production and nonsupervisory workers, is a potential explanation of other indicators of spare capacity in the US labor market.
By Steven Byers PhD, and Jeff Ferry
