The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has made more contributions to the study of income volatility than any other data set in the U.S. Its record of research is truly seminal. In this paper we first present the reasons that the PSID has made such major contributions to research on the...

The possible existence of trends in volatility in the U.S. labor market has been an important issue in both labor economics and macroeconomics. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has been the workhorse data set used to estimate trends in earnings volatility at the individual level....

One strand of the literature in labor economics, household finance, and macroeconomics has studied whether individual earnings volatility has risen or fallen in the U.S. over the last several decades. There are disagreements in the empirical literature on this question, with some suggestions...