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Making Sense of Incentives: Taming Business Incentives to Promote Prosperity
Timothy J. Bartik
2019In evaluating incentives, everything depends on the details: how much in incentives it takes to truly cause a firm to locate or expand, the multiplier effects, the effects of jobs on employment rates, how jobs affect tax revenue versus public spending needs. Do benefits of incentives exceed costs? This depends on the details. This book is about those details. What magnitudes of incentive effects are plausible? How do benefits and costs vary with incentive designs? What advice can be given to evaluators? What is an ideal incentive policy? Answering these questions about incentives depends on a model of incentive effects, which this book provides.
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Strengths of the Social Safety Net in the Great Recession : Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and Unemployment Insurance
Christopher J. O'Leary, David Walter Stevens, Stephen A. Wandner, and Michael Wiseman
2019The contributors in this book use administrative data from six states from before, during, and after the Great Recession to gauge the degree to which Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) and Unemployment Insurance (UI) interacted. They also recommend ways that the program policies could be altered to better serve those suffering hardship as a result of future economic downturns.
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Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System
Stephen A. Wandner
2018The 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 However, the UI system has been ignored by policymakers for decades and, say the authors, it is broken, out of date, and badly in need of repair.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.
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Disasters in the United States : Frequency, Costs, and Compensation
Vera Brusentsev and Wayne Vroman
2017Disasters are increasing in both frequency and financial costs. Analysis presented here deals with what we know about disasters in the United States including their increasing frequency of occurrence and associated financial costs, compensation available to survivors, where particular types of disasters are most likely to occur, and how disasters can be mitigated.
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Extending Work Life: Can Employers Adapt When Employees Want to Delay Retirement?
Robert L. Clark and Melinda Sandler Morrill
2017Aging 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.
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Workers' Compensation: Analysis for Its Second Century
H. Allan Hunt and Marcus Dillender
2017Hunt 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.
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Lessons Learned from Public Workforce Program Experiments
Stephen A. Wandner
2017This 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.
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Surviving Job Loss: Paper Makers in Maine and Minnesota
Kenneth A. Root and Rosemarie J. Park
2016Root 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.
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Sustaining Social Security in an Era of Population Aging
John A. Turner
2016John 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.
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Measuring Globalization: Better Trade Statistics for Better Policy
Susan N. Houseman and Michael J. Mandel
2015Understanding 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.
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Guild-Ridden Labor Markets: The Curious Case of Occupational Licensing
Morris M. Kleiner
2015In 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.
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Promise Nation: Transforming Communities through Place-Based Scholarships
Michelle Miller-Adams
2015Miller-Adams describes how the various "Promise-type" place-based scholarship programs impact college access, financial aid, and community transformation.
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From Preschool to Prosperity: The Economic Payoff to Early Childhood Education
Timothy J. Bartik
2014Bartik shows that investment in high-quality early childhood education has several long-term benefits, including higher adult earnings for program participants.
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The New Scarlet Letter? Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record
Steven Raphael
2014This book explores the difficulties facing ex-offenders as they try to enter and remain in the U.S. labor market.
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Privatizing Railroad Retirement
Steven A. Sass
2014Sass 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.
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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: The Role of Workforce Programs
Burt S. Barnow and Richard A. Hobbie
2013This 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.
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Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development
Timothy J. Bartik
2011Early childhood programs, if designed correctly, pay big economic dividends down the road because they increase the skills of their participants. And since many of those participants will remain in the same state or local area as adults, the local economy benefits: more persons with better skills attract business, which provides more and better jobs for the local economy. Bartik measures ratios of local economic development benefits to costs for both early childhood education and business incentives. He shows that early childhood programs and the best-designed business incentives can provide local benefits that significantly exceed costs. Given this, states and municipalities would do well to adopt economic development strategies that balance high-quality business incentives with early childhood programs.
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What Works in Work-First Welfare: Designing and Managing Employment Programs in New York City
Andrew R. Feldman
2011This book is a case study of how New York City's welfare-to-work programs were managed and implemented in the mid 2000s. Feldman also analyzes the unique characteristics that differentiate it from other programs in place across the country.
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Longevity Policy: Facing Up to Longevity Issues Affecting Social Security, Pensions, and Older Workers
John A. Turner
2011Turner argues that public policy should recognize longevity policy as a distinct policy area. Rather than separately treating issues raised by life expectancy (e.g., Social Security, pensions, older workers), a unified approach should be developed that recognizes their interrelationship.
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The Transformation of the American Pension System: Was it Beneficial for Workers?
Edward N. Wolff
2011The share of Americans with defined contribution pension plans now exceeds the share of those with defined benefit plans. Wolff refers to this as the "great transformation" and it leads him to examine recent evidence to see whether there are winners and losers resulting from this switch away from traditional pension plans.
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