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  Individual Accounts for Social Security Reform: International Perspectives on the U.S. Debate

  John A. Turner
  2006

  John Turner uses the documented experiences of many countries—including the U.K., Sweden, Chile, Australia, Canada, and others—and the tools of economics to analyze the public policy issues surrounding the proposed implementation of individual accounts as part of the U.S. Social Security system. The result is a book that clarifies these issues while offering direction to Social Security policymakers. Also included is a comprehensive overview of the types of defined contribution plans in use today.

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  Justice on the Job: Perspectives on the Erosion of Collective Bargaining in the United States

  Richard N. Block, Sheldon Friedman, Michelle Kaminski, and Andy Levin
  2006

  This volume presents an influential group of researchers who examine the current state of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. All of the researchers present empirical evidence to support their innovative ideas for advancing workers' rights.

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  Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?

  Morris M. Kleiner
  2006

  This book reveals the impacts of occupational licensing on the economies of the United States and several EU countries. Kleiner provides a thorough examination of the costs and benefits of occupational licensing (OL). He offers an explanation for the growth of OL, defines the winners and losers in terms of earnings and the quality of services provided by licensees, compares the differing labor market and price impacts of OL in the United States and Europe, provides evidence on the overall net impacts of OL for society, and offers policy alternatives to OL.

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  Social Security and the Stock Market: How the Pursuit of Market Magic Shapes the System

  Alicia Haydock Munnell and Steven A. Sass
  2006

  Munnell and Sass explore whether equities could help solve the woes facing the U.S. retirement income system in general, and the Social Security shortfall in particular. They examine the experiences of three nations that added equities to the investment mix of their retirement systems—the U.K., Australia, and Canada. As these experiences show, while equities promise higher returns than government bonds, how they are implemented—as add-ons, carve-outs, or as trust fund supplements—matters greatly.

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  The Geography of American Poverty: Is There a Need for Place-Based Policies?

  Mark D. Partridge and Dan S. Rickman
  2006

  Partridge and Rickman explore the wide geographic disparities in poverty across the United States. Their focus on the spatial dimensions of U.S. poverty reveals distinct differences across states, metropolitan areas, and counties and leads them to consider why antipoverty policies have succeeded in some places and failed in others.

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  The Shadow Workforce: Perspectives on Contingent Work in the United States, Japan, and Europe

  Sandra E. Gleason
  2006

  This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of nonstandard employment and its impact on employees, businesses, unions, and public policy. It not only reveals how nonstandard employment operates in the United States, Japan, and Europe, it also highlights the important similarities and differences in the labor market issues faced in those areas.

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  The Working Life: The Labor Market for Workers in Low-Skilled Jobs

  Nan L. Maxwell
  2006

  Maxwell presents the results of a survey of 405 employers, which queried them about jobs requiring no more than a high school education and no more than one year of work experience. These data allow her to establish the link between skills and low-skilled jobs and to reveal the current state of the labor market facing low-skilled workers. The data also highlights the knowledge and skills that employers require in low-skilled jobs and the abilities that individuals who apply for those jobs bring to the table.

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  Job Training That Gets Results: Ten Principles of Effective Employment Programs

  Michael Bernick
  2005

  Bernick shows the types of training programs that work and describes for whom they work. He identifies ways to improve performance among Workforce Investment Act (WIA) contractors while exploring the best uses for state discretionary WIA funds. He also describes what it takes to make an effective career ladder program, how postemployment welfare retention or skill advancement programs can succeed, and the type of training that workers with disabilities must go through to get and retain jobs.

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  Safety Practices, Firm Culture, and Workplace Injuries

  Richard J. Butler and Yong-Seung Park
  2005

  The authors present analysis of the impact of various HRM practices on firms’ workers’ compensation costs; specifically, which practices lower firms’ workers’ compensation costs and whether the impact is the result of changes in technical efficiency or comes through induced changes in workers’ behavior.

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  The Economics of Sustainable Development

  Sisay Asefa
  2005

  This title provides an economic perspective on critical issues that characterize the topic of sustainable development. In each case, the authors give hope that the challenges facing societies can be surmounted and millions can be lifted out of poverty by adopting policies that encourage the investment in human capital, democratic institutions, and improved market performance.

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  Unemployment Compensation Throughout the World: A Comparative Analysis

  Wayne Vroman and Vera Brusentsev
  2005

  The authors book that contains a contemporary perspective and review of UC programs in numerous countries throughout the world.

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  Welfare and Work: Experiences in Six Cities

  Christopher T. King and Peter R. Mueser
  2005

  King and Mueser examine changes in welfare participation and labor market involvement of welfare recipients in six major cities during the 1990s. By focusing on these six cities (Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, and Kansas City) they are able to glean the extent to which differences in state and local policy, administrative directives, and local labor market conditions contribute to the trends in caseloads, employment, and well-being observed among former recipients.

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  Workplace Injuries and Diseases: Prevention and Compensation - Essays in Honor of Terry Thomason

  Karen Roberts, John F. Burton, and Matthew M. Bodah
  2005

  This book presents a set of essays from a group of leading scholars that provides a detailed overview of what is known about the disability insurance system while highlighting areas of the system that beg for greater understanding.

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  Adequacy of Earnings Replacement in Workers' Compensation Programs: A Report of the Study Panel on Benefit Adequacy of the Workers' Compensation Steering Committee, National Academy of Social Insurance

  H. Allan Hunt and National Academy of Social Insurance
  2004

  The Workers’ Compensation Steering Committee of the National Academy of Social Insurance formed the Benefit Adequacy Study Panel to review the literature on benefit adequacy and to develop an approach to document what is currently known—and not known—about benefit adequacy in WC programs. The panel documents the extent to which WC cash benefits replace workers’ lost wages, and assesses the adequacy of that wage replacement.

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  By a Thread: How Child Care Centers Hold On to Teachers, How Teachers Build Lasting Careers

  Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai
  2004

  Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai examine how child care programs and their staff subsist in a field characterized by low pay, low status, and high turnover and what the impacts of these factors are on the quality of child care provided.

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  Communities and Workforce Development

  Edwin Meléndez
  2004

  The studies presented here constitute a significant step towards a comprehensive assessment of the role that community organizations played in revamping the employment services industry. Most importantly, they show how a new style of labor market intermediary has evolved from focusing almost exclusively on the provision of employment services to job seekers to simultaneously addressing the needs of both job seekers and employers.

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  Does "Trickle Down" Work?: Economic Development Strategies and Job Chains in Local Labor Markets

  Joseph Persky, Daniel Felsenstein, and Virginia Carlson
  2004

  Persky, Felsenstein, and Carlson explore a new framework for evaluating state and local economic development efforts. They propose a method, referred to as the “job-chains approach,” that they say clarifies the potential justifications for economic development subsidies as well as the limitations surrounding these efforts. This innovative approach addresses not only the number of job vacancies created as a result of a subsidized business investment or expansion, but also the extent to which gains are achieved by the unemployed and the underemployed, whether skilled or unskilled.

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  International Trade and Labor Markets: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications

  Carl Davidson and Steven J. Matusz
  2004

  Davidson and Matusz develop simple yet compelling models that allow for documented differences in labor markets across countries in order to investigate the impact of trade and trade policies on society's underclass.

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  Job Training Policy in the United States

  Christopher J. O'Leary, Robert A. Straits, and Stephen A. Wandner
  2004

  This book provides a broad overview of federally funded job training programs as they exist today. The notable list of contributors review what training consists of and how training programs are implemented under WIA. In particular, they examine training service providers and methods of delivering training services, including the use of individual training accounts and eligible training provider lists. Performance management under WIA is examined, as well as the effectiveness of training programs. In addition, public training programs are compared to private training provided in the United States and to public training programs offered in other industrial nations.

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  Kids at Work: The Value of Employer-Sponsored On-Site Child Care Centers

  Rachel Connelly, Deborah S. DeGraff, and Rachel A. Willis
  2004

  Connelly, DeGraff, and Willis chronicle the trends in the growth in on-site child care programs and perform analyses that shed light on the value of employer-sponsored child care to employees. The authors note that employees may not be the only ones to benefit. Employers may be able to gain wage savings for the firm.

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  Labor Exchange Policy in the United States

  David E. Balducchi, Randall W. Eberts, and Christopher J. O'Leary
  2004

  This book describes the evolution of labor exchange policy in the United States, summarizes the major findings about the effectiveness of labor exchange services, and offers reflections on the future for labor exchange policy. In addition, the contributors provide an international perspective on job brokerage functions and a discussion on the appropriate role for governments in helping job seekers and employers make the proper job match.

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  Leaving Welfare: Employment and Well-Being of Families that Left Welfare in the Post-Entitlement Era

  Gregory Acs and Pamela Loprest
  2004

  Acs and Loprest pull together information from a host of leaver studies to provide a bottom line assessment of what was learned. They compare welfare leaver outcomes across geographic areas and the nation as a whole. This effort allows them to paint a comprehensive picture of the employment, income, and hardships families experience after leaving welfare.

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  Workplace Justice Without Unions

  Hoyt N. Wheeler, Brian S. Klaas, and Douglas M. Mahony
  2004

  Wheeler, Klaas, and Mahony provide a thorough analysis of organizational justice systems by exploring nonunion systems of workplace justice and comparing them with the union system, American courts, and systems in 11 other countries.

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  Bargaining for Competitiveness: Law, Research, and Case Studies

  Richard N. Block
  2003

  This book offers an analysis of the relationship among collective bargaining, firm competitiveness, and employment protections and creation in the United States. The contributors provide an overview of the legal framework and the economic and industrial relations research on collective bargaining, competitiveness, and employment, then follow with four case studies that provide insights into the process of collective bargaining and its current status in the evolving U.S. labor-management system.

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  Helping Working Families: The Earned Income Tax Credit

  Saul D. Hoffman and Laurence S. Seidman
  2003

  Hoffman and Seidman offer a thorough assessment of the EITC in which they analyze, evaluate, summarize, and critique the state of the program. They find that, overall, the EITC works well, and that it has earned its political popularity. Yet they also uncover several problem areas that they address with specific recommendations based on their analysis.