This paper examines the reasons why employers used and even increased their use of temporary help agencies during the tight labor markets of the 1990s. Based on case study evidence from the hospital and auto supply industries, we evaluate various hypotheses for this phenomenon. In high-skilled...

Barnow, Trutko, and Piatak focus on whether persistent occupation-specific labor shortages might lead to inefficiencies in the U.S. economy. They describe why shortages arise, the difficulty in ascertaining that a shortage is present, and how to assess strategies to alleviate the shortage.

A variety of evidence points to significant growth in domestic contracting out over the last two decades, yet the phenomenon is not well documented. In this paper, we pull together data from various sources to shed light on the extent of and trends in domestic outsourcing, the occupations in...

Maxwell extablishes the link between skills and low-skilled jobs and reveals the state of he labor market facing low-skilled workers.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the results, methodology, and processes used in a series of net labor market impact studies done for the State of Washington over the past six years. All of the studies relied on administrative data and used a technique referred to as quasi-...

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4 percent during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5 percent by 2000. Our analysis...

This book provides a very useful introduction to methodologies for measuring inequality, a comprehensive overview of changes in inequality which have occurred in the United States, and an informative discussion of a variety of policy-related issues.

Hyclak examines changes in the structure of wages paid for some 40 different jobs found in four different occupational groups. In addition, he concentrates on the jobs and the skills required as the primary determinant of wages, an approach, he says, that complements the more traditional human...

Madden uses MSA data that link characteristics of metropolitan economies to significant changes in income inequality. This allows her to study changes in poverty rates, household income inequality, and wage inequality within 182 of the largest MSAs and to identify what she says are the three...