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Alternative Economic Indicators
C. James Hueng, Editor
2020Policymakers and business practitioners are eager to gain access to reliable information on the state of the economy for timely decision making. More so now than ever. Traditional economic indicators have been criticized for delayed reporting, out-of-date methodology, and neglecting some aspects of the economy. Recent advances in economic theory, econometrics, and information technology have fueled research in building broader, more accurate, and higher-frequency economic indicators. This volume contains contributions from a group of prominent economists who address alternative economic indicators, including indicators in the financial market, indicators for business cycles, and indicators of economic uncertainty.
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The Political Economy of Inequality: U.S. and Global Dimensions
Sisay Asefa, Editor and Wei-Chiao Huang, Editor
2020The contributors to this book discuss a variety of forms of social inequality which include large gaps in accumulated assets, discrepancies in access to quality education, unstable family life, lack of access to banking services, poor employment prospects, lack of health care services, and underrepresentation for political and legal matters. Together, they show how these forms of inequality are interrelated with income inequality and that, taken together, they pose the risk for societal and political unrest should they be left unresolved.
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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, Editor; David Walter Stevens, Editor; Stephen A. Wandner, Editor; and Michael Wiseman, Editor
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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The Impacts of China's Rise on the Pacific and the World
Wei-Chiao Huang, Editor and Huizhong Zhou, Editor
2018This book provides the perspectives of a group of noted China experts on how China’s economic expansion and internal reforms are impacting its neighbors in the Pacific region as well as the United States and the rest of the world.
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Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System
Stephen A. Wandner, Editor
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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Confronting Policy Challenges of the Great Recession: Lessons for Macroeconomic Policy
Eskander Alvi, Editor
2017This book presents several notable economists who describe the perils the economy faced during the Great Recession and the policies—some successful, others not so much—that were implemented and why. By now, economists have had nearly a decade to examine the causes and consequences of the damage wrought by the Great Recession, and to assess the ensuing efforts to right the economy. The unprecedented losses, which spread across the global economy, posed extraordinary challenges for central bankers and policymakers alike, who were forced to throw out the playbook and create new, untested means for restoring growth.
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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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How Did Employee Ownership Firms Weather the Last Two Recessions?: Employee Ownership, Employment Stability, and Firm Survival in the United States: 1999-2011
Fidan Ana Kurtulus and Douglas L. Kruse
2017Employee ownership firms offer workers the opportunity to own a stake in the firms where they work. This affords them the ability to share in profits and have a voice in firm-related decision-making. In this comprehensive new book, Kurtulus and Kruse provide new evidence on whether employee ownership firms are better equipped to survive recessions. In particular, they focus on broad-based employee ownership, which includes ownership at all levels in the firm’s hierarchy.
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The STEM Dilemma: Skills that Matter to Regions
Fran Stewart
2017Fran Stewart dives into the murky waters where education and economic goals meet to confront several key issues facing policymakers and educators, including the role of public investment in human capital, the types of human capital investment that provide the greatest public return, and whether those investments should vary by region.
She shows that not all high-paying jobs require STEM skills; that not all good-paying, highly skilled STEM jobs require college degrees; and that "soft skills" are important for STEM as well as other high-paying jobs.
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Lessons Learned from Public Workforce Program Experiments
Stephen A. Wandner, Editor
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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Evolving Approaches to the Economics of Public Policy: Views of Award-Winning Economists
Jean Kimmel, Editor
2016For policymakers, economics is a useful tool in the development and evaluation of public policy. And like many sciences, economics is evolving to become more interdisciplinary in its approach. Today, economic theory is often used in conjunction with insights gleaned from psychology and sociology to create a more inclusive, real-world approach to implementing public policy. In this book, five award-winning economists tackle a diverse range of topics and show how applied economics has evolved to give policymakers a more nuanced approach to policy development. The award-winning economists included in this volume are Erica Field, Nancy Folbre, Avner Grief, David M. Kreps, and Michael J. Piore, and the topics they discuss include microfinance, human capital, societal institutions, worker motivation, and workplace regulation.
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The Economics of Health
Donald J. Meyer, Editor
2016Donald J. Meyer leads a group of notable health economists who explore critical issues—and their economic impacts—facing the nation's healthcare system today. These include lifestyle choices and their health impacts, decisions on medical care and self-care, the fee-for-service payment model, disability and workers’ compensation insurance claims, long-term care, and how various aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) impact the nation’s healthcare system. Contributors include M. Kate Bundorf, Marcus Dillender, John H. Goddeeris, Donald J. Meyer, Edward C. Norton, and Charles E. Phelps.
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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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The Political Economy of Good Governance
Sisay Asefa, Editor and Wei-Chiao Huang, Editor
2015The contributors to this book capture several of the key dimensions of good governance, as well as what deleterious and negative consequences may arise in its absence. They draw analysis and solutions from diverse sectors such as economics, public administration, management, and political science, in order to treat some of the most pressing societal issues of our time. They connect the importance of education, health, climate change, and poverty to address the challenges of creating a world where more countries embrace good governance policies to benefit their peoples.
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Student Loans and the Dynamics of Debt
Brad J. Hershbein, Editor and Kevin M. Hollenbeck, Editor
2015The papers included in this volume represent the most current research and knowledge available about student loans and repayment. It serves as a valuable reference for researchers and policymakers who seek a deeper understanding of how, why, and which students borrow for their postsecondary education; how this borrowing may affect later decisions; and what measures can help borrowers repay their loans successfully.
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Measuring Globalization: Better Trade Statistics for Better Policy
Susan N. Houseman, Editor and Michael J. Mandel, Editor
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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