There’s no place like home for some adults who lose jobs
Anew report offers some insight into one aspect of a phenomenon more baby boomers are experiencing up close and personal: adult children who live close to home.
Initially, the researchers analyzed adults aged 25 to 35 who lost their jobs through layoffs or some other reason beyond their control, looking at how long it took to reach their former wage levels once they got a new job.
The researchers found that young adults who lived near their parents when they lost their jobs reached their former wage levels much faster than young adults who lived farther away.
The most recent research found that most of those faster earnings recoveries were experienced by young adults with children of their own. For young adults without children, earnings recoveries between those who lived near home and those who lived farther away were similar.
“That suggests that people without children don’t get the same benefit as workers with children,” said Pawel Krolikowski of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
The research economist worked on the project with Patrick Coate, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and Mike Zabek, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan.
Mr. Krolikowski said he and his colleagues concluded the ability of young adults with children to get back to former wage levels faster than those living farther away was linked to the help that their baby
boomer parents provided by taking care of their grandchildren during working hours rather than additional rent assistance their parents provided.
He said the researchers also found some “weak” evidence that young adults living close to home are more likely to get a new job in the same industry as their parents, suggesting they are using their parents’ contacts.
The study does not examine what kind of earnings recoveries young adults experience when they lose their job and move back in with their parents.
The most recent U.S. Census data indicates nearly 20 percent of men aged 25 to 34 were living with their parents in 2017, up from about 13 percent in 2000 and 15 percent in 1990.
For female adults in the same age group, the figures were 12.5 percent in 2017, 8.3 percent in 2000 and 8.1 percent in 1990.
CEOs are still making more than you
Just when you thought the dust had settled on the 2018 corporate executive compensation season, a new report chronicles the disparity in pay between CEOs and the rest of us.
The average CEO of the 350 largest U.S. firms made an estimated $18.9 million in 2017, or 312 times more than the average worker, according to a report issued last week by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
That’s up from average CEO pay of $16 million in 2016, which resulted in a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 270-to-1, the Washington, D.C. research group said.
By comparison, in 2009, the year the recession ended, the average CEO earned $11 million and the CEO-toworker pay ratio was 188-to1, according to EPIs math. In 2000, the height of the dot.com bubble, the average CEO made $21 million, or 344 times more than the average worker, the group said.
All of those EPI numbers are based on money that chief executives received by exercising stock options.
Excluding those windfalls and relying instead on the estimated value of stock options that CEOs were granted in a particular year, their 2017 pay was $13.3 million, or 221 times what the average worker made, vs. $13 million and a CEO-toworker pay ratio of 220-to-1 in 2016.
EPI researchers discovered that since 1978, CEO pay has accelerated much faster than stock prices, corporate profits and average worker pay.
No matter how you measure it, “Higher CEO pay does not reflect correspondingly higher output or better firm performance,” researchers concluded. “CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because they are more productive or have special talents or more education.”
EPI’s proposed remedies are bound to trigger the Twitter fingers of President Donald Trump and the business groups that eagerly backed his tax cuts. The research group suggests raising the marginal income tax rates for the higher earners; making companies with high CEO-toworker pay ratios pay higher taxes; and setting a cap on compensationand taxing anythingover that limit.
That’s not likely to happen. It seems the poor — as well as the rich — will always be with us.