Upjohn Open Access Books

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Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System

Stephen A. Wandner
2018

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) system is a lasting piece of the Social Security Act which was enacted in 1935. But like most things that are over 80 years old, it occasionally needs maintenance to keep it operating smoothly while keeping up with the changing demands placed upon it. However, the UI system has been ignored by policymakers for decades and, say the authors, it is broken, out of date, and badly in need of repair.

Stephen A. Wandner pulls together a group of UI researchers, each with decades of experience, who describe the weaknesses in the current system and propose policy reforms that they say would modernize the system and prepare us for the next recession. Contributors include: David E. Balducchi, Christopher J. O'Leary, Suzanne Simonetta, Wayne Vroman, and Stephen A. Wandner.
Extending Work Life: Can Employers Adapt When Employees Want to Delay Retirement?

Robert L. Clark and Melinda Sandler Morrill
2017

Aging men and women are increasingly remaining in the labor force. Most often the reason for this is that they need to work additional years in order to be able to support an increasing number of years in retirement. This leaves employers scrambling for ways to adapt to a growing number of retirement-aged workers. Clark and Morrill provide a thorough assessment of the costs and benefits of accommodating later retirement ages, and they describe options employers may use to create some new form of employment contract with aging workers.

The most prominent issues employers with aging workers face are declining productivity, rising labor and benefits costs, and a suboptimal age distribution of their workforces. According to the authors, employers could respond to these issues by finding new ways to accommodate older workers with, for instance, phased retirement and return-to-work policies. But the success of such policies also depends on tax policies and whether government-provided retirement benefits could be redesigned to play a role in a newly-defined employment relationship.
Workers' Compensation: Analysis for Its Second Century

H. Allan Hunt and Marcus Dillender
2017

Hunt and Dillender review the status of workers' compensation programs on three critical performance areas: 1) the adequacy of compensation for those disabled in the workplace, 2) return-to-work performance for injured workers, and 3) prevention of disabling injury and disease.
Lessons Learned from Public Workforce Program Experiments

Stephen A. Wandner
2017

This book chronicles many of the most important experiments and the key lessons derived from the evaluations of both existing large-scale public workforce programs and the development of new interventions—including low-cost experiments based on behavioral science methods.
Surviving Job Loss: Paper Makers in Maine and Minnesota

Kenneth A. Root and Rosemarie J. Park
2016

Root and Park examine the plight of long-tenured workers displaced from two paper mills—their paths to reemployment, retirement decisions, and the personal struggles they confront.
Sustaining Social Security in an Era of Population Aging

John A. Turner
2016

John A. Turner offers a set of reforms for restoring solvency to Social Security that are deemed to have merit in the current political climate. These reforms relate to several vexing issues including increased life expectancy, the growing relationship between income and life expectancy, the declines in the physical demands of jobs, growing income inequality, and the pattern of poverty increasing at older ages.
Measuring Globalization: Better Trade Statistics for Better Policy

Susan N. Houseman and Michael J. Mandel
2015

Understanding the impacts of globalization requires good data, and national statistical systems were not designed to measure many of the transactions occurring in today’s global economy. The chapters in this volume and its companion volume identify biases and gaps in national statistics, examine the magnitude of the problems they pose, and propose solutions to address significant biases and fill key data gaps.
Guild-Ridden Labor Markets: The Curious Case of Occupational Licensing

Morris M. Kleiner
2015

In his third Upjohn Press book on occupational licensing, Morris M. Kleiner examines why the institution of occupational licensing has had such a curious evolution and influence in the United States, the European Union, and China. He also discusses the many similarities it has to guilds.
Promise Nation: Transforming Communities through Place-Based Scholarships

Michelle Miller-Adams
2015

Miller-Adams describes how the various "Promise-type" place-based scholarship programs impact college access, financial aid, and community transformation.
From Preschool to Prosperity: The Economic Payoff to Early Childhood Education

Timothy J. Bartik
2014

Bartik shows that investment in high-quality early childhood education has several long-term benefits, including higher adult earnings for program participants.
The New Scarlet Letter? Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record

Steven Raphael
2014

This book explores the difficulties facing ex-offenders as they try to enter and remain in the U.S. labor market.
Privatizing Railroad Retirement

Steven A. Sass
2014

Sass discusses the evolution of the U.S. Railroad Retirement System and whether its ability to invest its assets in private equities offers any lessons for Social Security.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: The Role of Workforce Programs

Burt S. Barnow and Richard A. Hobbie
2013

This book examines the nature of the workforce development and UI policy decisions made nationwide in response to the recession, state and local administrators’ perspectives on the policy developments and economic challenges, and implementation of key Recovery Act provisions, with a particular focus on workforce development initiatives in the Recovery Act.
Pension Policy: The Search for Better Solutions

John A. Turner
2010

Turner identifies the current problems facing pension policy for U.S. employer-provided pension plans and recommends solutions to those problems based on his examination of pension systems in other industrialized nations.
Human Resource Economics and Public Policy: Essays in Honor of Vernon M. Briggs Jr.

Charles J. Whalen
2010

This book pays tribute to Vernon Briggs and his enduring mark on the study of human resources. The chapters, by his students and colleagues, explore and extend Briggs’s work on employment, education and training, immigration, and local labor markets. His unwavering emphasis on institutional reality, public policy, and economic dynamics animates the entire collection.
Against the Tide: Household Structure, Opportunities, and Outcomes among White and Minority Youth

Carolyn J. Hill, Harry J. Holzer, and Henry Chen
2009

The authors examine the effects of household structure on young adults and how these effects might have contributed to the negative trends in educational and employment outcomes observed for young minorities over time.
Counting Working-Age People with Disabilities: What Current Data Tell Us and Options for Improvement

Andrew J. Houtenville, David C. Stapleton, Robert R. Weathers, and Richard V. Burkhauser
2009

This book offers a systematic review of what current statistics and data on working-age people with disabilities can and cannot tell us, and how the quality of the data can be improved to better inform policymakers, advocates, analysts, service providers, administrators, and others interested in this at-risk population.
Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?: Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States

William Lazonick
2009

Lazonick explores the origins of the new era of employment insecurity and income inequality, and considers what governments, businesses, and individuals can do about it. He also asks whether the United States can refashion its high-tech business model to generate stable and equitable economic growth.
The Power of a Promise: Education and Economic Renewal in Kalamazoo

Michelle Miller-Adams
2009

In the first comprehensive account of the Kalamazoo Promise, Michelle Miller-Adams addresses both the potential and challenges inherent in place-based universal scholarship programs and explains why this unprecedented experiment in education-based economic renewal is being emulated by scores of cities and towns around the nation.
Strategies for Improving Economic Mobility of Workers: Bridging Research and Practice

Maude Toussaint-Comeau and Bruce D. Meyer
2009

The contributors to this book provide a provocative assessment of the effectiveness of various policies and practices designed to help disadvantaged segments of our population overcome the obstacles in their path to upward economic mobility.
The International Law of Economic Migration: Toward the Fourth Freedom

Joel P. Trachtman
2009

This volume examines the welfare economics, political economy, and legal experience in international economic migration, and on the basis of its analysis, suggests the structure of a multilateral framework agreement on international economic migration.
A Future of Good Jobs?: America's Challenge in the Global Economy

Timothy J. Bartik , Editor and Susan N. Houseman , Editor
2008

Can the U.S. economy generate healthy growth of “good” jobs—jobs that will ensure a steady improvement in the standard of living for the middle class and that will offer a way out of poverty for low-income Americans? In this book, leading policy analysts examine the challenges facing current U.S. labor market policy and propose concrete steps to make American workers and employers more competitive in a global economy.
Older and Out of Work: Jobs and Social Insurance for a Changing Economy

Randall W. Eberts and Richard Hobbie
2008

The chapters in this volume, originally presented at a conference organized by the National Academy of Social Insurance, come from a group of policy experts who advance our understanding of the labor market experiences of older workers while pointing out that current workforce programs often leave this growing population underserved.
Income Volatility and Food Assistance in the United States

Dean Jolliffe and James Patrick Ziliak
2008

This book provides a much-needed look at recent trends in income volatility and its effects on the design of and participation in the nation's food assistance programs.
How Do We Spend Our Time?: Evidence from the American Time Use Study

Jean Kimmel
2008

This book offers contributions from a number of noted economists who use the American Time Use Survey to reveal findings that have numerous implications for the U.S. labor market. The authors examine topics such as child care, housework, household production and consumption, and shift work. In each case, the focus is on the value of time and how time spent on one activity instead of another represents value gained for the first activity and value lost for the second.