"The next section distinguishes the growth rates of quality-unadjusted hours of labor input (as used in Table 1) from the quality-adjusted growth rates that include the effects of changing composition across education, experience, and gender categories. During 1964-79 it appears that the benefits of increasing educational attainment were cancelled out by a shift toward less experienced teenagers and the rapid inflow of females into the labor force. After 1979 the share of teenagers declined and the female labor force participation rate levelled off, allowing the positive impact of increasing educational attainment to be augmented by a slight increase in workforce experience."
I can understand how education and experience enter into this model, but what is it about being specifically female that implies a lessening LF quality? Does anyone know the history of this and whether it's controversial in the trade? It seem outrageous on the face of it.
Later, Gordon writes (his big wave is the rise in U.S. productivity between 1913 and 1964 - peaking 1928-50 - and its subsequent fall (not reversed in recent years by computers):
"Immigration and the co-dependence of Productivity and Real Wages. Given the timing of the 'big wave,' it is striking that productivity growth was slow in the late nineteenth century when immigration was important, and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when the baby boom and renewed immigration created rapid labor-force growth. This observation is related to Romer's (1987, Figure 1) demonstration that productivity growth and labor-force growth in U. S. history is negatively correlated over 20-year intervals since 1839. Thinking about immigration may be helpful in explaining why the U. S. MFP growth slowdown in the 1970-90 period has been concentrated in nonmanufacturing. My idea (further developed in Gordon, 1997) is that new entrants (teens and adult females in the 1970s and legal and illegal immigrants in the 1980s) have mainly gone into unskilled service jobs and have held down the real wage in services, in turn promoting the lavish use of unskilled labor in such occupations as grocery baggers, busboys, valet parkers, and parking lot attendants, jobs that barely exist in high-wage European economies. In contrast, immigrants in the 1890-1913 period were disproportionately employed in manufacturing, and their prescence probably dampened real wage increases and delayed the introduction of labor-saving equipment. The 'big 22 wave' period of rapid productivity growth coincides roughly with the shutting off of mass immigration in the 1920s and the slow labor-force growth of 1930-65."
Any thoughts on this?