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Intergenerational Mobility: How Gender, Race, and Family Structure Affect Adult Outcomes
Jean Kimmel, Editor
2022This volume presents a complex portrait of the interrelationships among parents’ marital status and education, child gender, and the nature and success of children’s transitions into adulthood. The first three chapters focus on differences in parents’ investments in their children, while the final three chapters focus directly on intergenerational income mobility.
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Are Participants Good Evaluators?
Jeffrey A. Smith, Alexander Whalley, and Nathaniel T. Wilcox
2021Managers of workforce training programs are often unable to afford costly, full-fledged experimental or nonexperimental evaluations to determine their programs’ impacts. Therefore, many rely on the survey responses of program participants to gauge program impacts.
Smith, Whalley, and Wilcox present the first attempt to assess such measures despite their already widespread use in program evaluations. They develop a multidisciplinary framework for addressing the issue and apply it to three case studies: the National Job Training Partnership Act Study, the U.S. National Supported Work Demonstration, and the Connecticut Jobs First Program.
Each of these studies were subjected to experimental evaluations that included a survey-based participant evaluation measure. The authors apply econometric methods specifically developed to obtain estimates of program impacts among individuals in the studies and then compare these estimates with survey-based participant evaluation measures to obtain an assessment of the surveys’ efficacy.
The authors also discuss how their findings fit into the broader literatures in economics, psychology, and survey research.
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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 Traditional economic indicators have been criticized for delayed reporting, out-of-date methodology, and neglecting some aspects of the economy.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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Data Science in the Public Interest: Improving Government Performance in the Workforce
Joshua D. Hawley
2020This book is about how new and underutilized types of big data sources can inform public policy decisions related to workforce development. Hawley describes how government is currently using data to inform decisions about the workforce at the state and local levels. He then moves beyond standardized performance metrics designed to serve federal agency requirements and discusses how government can improve data gathering and analysis to provide better, up-to-date information for government decision making.
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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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Food Stamps and the Working Poor
Peter R. Mueser, David C. Ribar, and Erdal Tekin
2019The authors show that many households that are eligible for food stamps do not receive them, and that eligible individuals' enrollment is influenced by the states' administrative requirements. Highlighted are the procedures for certifying applicants and recertifying recipients, and policies for treatment of able-bodied adults without dependents.
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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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Pathways to Careers in Health Care
Christopher T. King, Editor and Philip Young P. Hong, Editor
2019The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010 effected major changes in the financing and delivery of health care in the United States. It also authorized creation of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants program (HPOG), a demonstration effort within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide opportunities for education and training that lead to jobs and career advancement in health care for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and other low-income individuals and to respond to the increasing demand for health care professionals. As a demonstration program, HPOG also featured a mandated federal evaluation to assess its success and a corresponding research program—the HPOG University Partnership Research Grants (HPOG UP), a collaborative effort between the program operators and academic researchers from different disciplines—to observe various aspects of its operations.
HPOG unites two important innovations in workforce development programming for serving low-income populations in recent decades, career pathways and sector strategies, by actively fostering the use of the former in the context of one major sector—health care. Health care is one of the only sectors that continued to exhibit growth year after year in periods of general economic expansion as well as decline. Health care employment even continued to expand in most states and communities across the United States through the Great Recession in 2008–2009. In addition to offering insights into these strategies and their evolution, the authors in this book present the findings, lessons, and recommendations that emanated from HPOG research and evaluations for consideration by policymakers, program operators, and other researchers.
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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 Human and Economic Implications of Twenty-First Century Immigration Policy
Susan Pozo , Editor
2018To effectively debate immigration policy we need to be better informed. This book helps by presenting a group of prominent scholars who use data to help unravel the facts. They address immigration’s fiscal impacts, immigrants’ generational assimilation, enhanced U.S. enforcement, and alternatives for those seeking refugee status. Together, they help move us from the personal to the analytical, providing us a rational appraisal of immigration and the policies currently before us.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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