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  Unemployment Insurance Reform: Fixing a Broken System

  Stephen A. Wandner
  2018

  The 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 However, the UI system has been ignored by policymakers for decades and, say the authors, it is broken, out of date, and badly in need of repair.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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  Extending Work Life: Can Employers Adapt When Employees Want to Delay Retirement?

  Robert L. Clark and Melinda Sandler Morrill
  2017

  Aging 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
  2017

  Hunt 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
  2017

  This 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
  2016

  Root 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
  2016

  John 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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  Guild-Ridden Labor Markets: The Curious Case of Occupational Licensing

  Morris M. Kleiner
  2015

  In 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
  2015

  Miller-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
  2014

  Bartik 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
  2014

  This 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
  2014

  Sass 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.