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...

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades...

Bartik provides evidence showing that investment in quality preschool education provides economic payoffs, particularly in lifetime earnings.

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...

Policy experts advance our understanding of the labor market experiences of older workers while pointing our that current workforce programs often leave this growing population underserved.

This study offers a comparative analysis of a number of Japanese labor market features in relation to the U.S. The author examines employer-employee attachment, workforce adjustment, and industrial relations including "unique" Japanese institutions such as joint consultation and consensus-based...