Labor Market
What Happens After Job Training Part II: Healthcare, Skilled Trades, and Technology Student Labor Market Trajectories
By Rachel Inafuku Hawaiʻi has long faced one of the highest costs of living in the nation, creating persistent financial pressure for local families. Housing costs remain especially high, with median single-family home prices exceeding $1.1 million. Everyday expenses are also elevated: according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, prices for consumer goods in Hawaiʻi […]
Read MoreBeyond the hype: What research shows about the value of college in the AI era
By Rachel Inafuku and Steven Bond-Smith Does a college education still provide significant labor market advantages in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era? Many observers argue that AI is beginning to replace the entry-level white-collar roles that once served as career launching points for new college graduates. A 2024 McKinsey & Company survey found that the […]
Read MorePublication: Shadows and Donuts: The Work-From-Home Revolution and The Performance of Cities
In this article, we set out the relationships between the behavioral and spatial responses to working from home. The analytical framework centres explicitly on the choice of commuting frequency as the key decision-making variable that endogenously reshapes the relationships between other spatial and nonspatial variables as a result of the work-from-home revolution. We find that […]
Read MoreWhat Happens After Job Training? Preliminary Wage and Employment Insights from Good Jobs Hawai‘i
By Rachel Inafuku and Tim Halliday Hawai‘i’s workforce has long faced a persistent challenge: high living costs combined with a concentration of low-wage, low-skill employment. The Good Jobs Hawai‘i (GJHI) program is a tuition-free, non-credit training program offered through the University of Hawai‘i Community Colleges. It was launched to help local residents gain skills and […]
Read MoreHow New Mass Transit Affects Labor Markets: The Honolulu Skyline
Understanding how the new rail system in Oahu is reshaping decisions around work, housing, and commuting can inform future transit investments. To get a more in-depth picture of how the Honolulu Skyline is influencing the labor market, I developed a spatial model with highly detailed data that allowed me to analyze commuting times, the employment […]
Read MoreExploring the Gender Pay Gap in Hawai‘i
The US has made substantial progress in closing the historical earnings gap between men and women, but data from the American Community Survey (ACS) shows that from 2015 to 2022 full-time working women in the US earned 84 cents for every dollar a man made. In Hawai‘i, full-time women fared slightly better, making 86 cents […]
Read MoreThe Gender Pay Gap in Hawaii
By Rachel Inafuku In recognition of International Women’s Day, which was recently celebrated on March 8, UHERO wishes to underscore the importance of women in the workforce by highlighting research on the gender pay gap in Hawaii that was presented in our latest forecast report. Please keep an eye out for forthcoming research that explores […]
Read MoreOnly the fit survive recessions: Estimating labor market penalties for the obese over the business cycle
Abstract: The obesity epidemic is a growing concern in the United States. Aside from the detrimental health effects of obesity, previous work has also documented a negative relationship between obesity and various labor market outcomes. Given that the American adult obesity rate is roughly 40%, obesity affects a large portion of the US labor market. […]
Read MoreBird’s eye view of COVID-19, mobility, and labor market outcomes across the US
COVID-19 dealt a formidable blow to the US economy. We present a joint analysis of the epidemiological and labor market outcomes across US states. We focus on the relationship across relevant indicators in the pre-vaccination era. As expected, we find strong correlation between changes in economic conditions and mobility. However, mobility fluctuations tend to be […]
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