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  Education Reform and the Limits of Policy: Lessons from Michigan

  Michael F. Addonizio and C. Philip Kearney
  2012

  By examining a major set of education policy reforms undertaken in Michigan and across the country over the past 20-plus years, Addonizio and Kearney are able to reveal the varying success of innovations such as finance reform, state assessment of student performance, school accountability measures, charter schools, and schools of choice.

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  Reconnecting to Work: Policies to Mitigate Long-Term Unemployment and Its Consequences

  Lauren D. Appelbaum, Editor
  2012

  The goal of this book is to enable a better understanding of the consequences of long-term unemployment and the policies that are needed to address it. The contributors present research that examines the psychological as well as economic consequences of experiencing a prolonged spell of joblessness. Included are discussions of policies to increase job creation and to get the long-term unemployed back into jobs.

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  Dragon versus Eagle: The Chinese Economy and U.S.-China Relations

  Wei-Chiao Huang, Editor and Huizhong Zhou, Editor
  2012

  This book contains a group of papers that examine the complex and evolving economic relationship between China and the United States.

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  Employment Growth from Public Support of Innovation in Small Firms

  Albert N. Link and John T. Scott
  2012

  Link and Scott provide a statistical assessment of the employment growth associated with public support of R&D in small, entrepreneurial firms through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

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  The Health and Wealth of a Nation: Employer-Based Health Insurance and the Affordable Care Act

  Nan L. Maxwell
  2012

  This research examines the behaviors of firms with respect to their provision of health care prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) deliberations and uses those behaviors to assess changes in employer-sponsored health insurance that might occur once the ACA is fully implemented.

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  Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development

  Timothy J. Bartik
  2011

  Early 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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  The Workforce Investment Act: Implementation Experiences and Evaluation Findings

  Douglas J. Besharov, Editor and Phoebe H. Cottingham, Editor
  2011

  This volume examines WIA’s objectives and the evidence on program performance and impact. The chapters are organized into five general areas: 1) understanding WIA, 2) program implementation, 3) performance management, 4) impact evaluations, and 5) future evaluation choices.

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  What Works in Work-First Welfare: Designing and Managing Employment Programs in New York City

  Andrew R. Feldman
  2011

  This 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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  The Performance of Performance Standards

  James J. Heckman, Editor; Carolyn J. Heinrich, Editor; Pascal Courty, Editor; Gerald Marschke, Editor; and Jeffrey Smith, Editor
  2011

  Using a variety of data sources, the contributors explore how performance standards and incentives affect the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants.

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  Advances in Economic Forecasting

  Matthew L. Higgins, Editor
  2011

  This book's contributors assess the performance of economic forecasting methods, argue that data can be better exploited through model and forecast combination, and advocate for models that are adaptive and perform well in the presence of nonlinearity and structural change. The contributors are: Michael D. Bradley, Dean Croshure, Dennis W. Jansen, Kajal Lahiri, Tae-Hwy Lee, David E. Rapach, and H.O. Stekler.

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  Imagining the Ideal Pension System: International Perspectives

  Dana M. Muir, Editor and John A. Turner, Editor
  2011

  Muir and Turner gather an international roster of pension experts who present what they think would be the ideal pension systems for their countries and why. Those countries include the United States, the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Poland, and Japan.

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  Longevity Policy: Facing Up to Longevity Issues Affecting Social Security, Pensions, and Older Workers

  John A. Turner
  2011

  Turner 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
  2011

  The 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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  Mothers' Work and Children's Lives: Low-Income Families after Welfare Reform

  Rucker C. Johnson, Ariel Kalil, and Rachel E. Dunifon
  2010

  This book examines the effects of work requirements imposed by welfare reform on low-income women and their families. The authors pay particular attention to the nature of work—whether it is stable or unstable, the number of hours worked in a week and the regularity and flexibility of work schedules. They also show how these factors make it more difficult for low-income women to balance their work and family requirements.

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  Globalization and International Development: Critical Issues of the 21st Century

  Sisay Asefa, Editor
  2010

  These papers address globalization issues with a special emphasis on its impact on poverty. Advances in transportation and telecommunications with instantaneous information and communication flows requires new approaches given the wide differences in cultures, political systems, languages, and ethnicities. Extreme variation in the international distributions of wealth, income, and poverty remain as enormous social problems to be addressed. In general, the contributors recommend expanding the flows between countries to accelerate growth and reduce inequalities. These flows include international trade and capital, migration, remittances, and foreign aid. But in addition to these hard commodities and dollars, there are flows of ideas, knowledge, and technical assistance which require enforcement of appropriate intellectual property rights.

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  The Time Use of Mothers in the United States at the Beginning of the 21st Century

  Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel
  2010

  Connelly and Kimmel focus on the time use of mothers of preteenaged children in the United States from 2003 to 2006. They explore how mothers use their time in order to better understand their lives, the lives of their partners, and the lives of their children.

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  The Economics of Natural and Unnatural Disasters

  William Kern, Editor
  2010

  These papers present the economic issues debates that arise when natural disasters strike. Better mechanisms for coping with disasters through better preparation and mitigation efforts are addressed. The authors discuss insurance and risk and suggest long-term insurance arrangements and government policy action. The themes addressed also include the ability of potential disaster victims to accurately assess the risks they face, the role of incentives in ensuring that mitigation efforts are undertaken, the adequacy of the evaluation of the impact of disasters on economies, and discussion of the effectiveness of current government policies toward disaster prevention and relief.

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  Solving the Reemployment Puzzle: From Research to Policy

  Stephen A. Wandner, Walter Corson, David E. Balducchi, and Jon Messenger
  2010

  Wandner examines the research and evaluation of U.S. employment and training programs over the past 25 years. He also discusses the impact such research can have and how misuse of research findings can hamper program effectiveness.

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  Pension Policy: The Search for Better Solutions

  John A. Turner
  2009

  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.

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  Human Resource Economics and Public Policy: Essays in Honor of Vernon M. Briggs Jr.

  Charles J. Whalen, Editor
  2009

  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.