The goal of this paper is to develop a comprehensive research agenda to analyze trends in domestic outsourcing in the United States - firms' use of contractors and independent contractors - and its effects on job quality and inequality. In the process, we review definitions of outsourcing, the...

Data from national surveys show the dramatic changes that have taken place in the US wage structure over the past three decades. However, these data provide only very limited information about the complex reasons why those changes have occurred and why there is significant variation in the wages...

"For a variety of reasons described in the paper, improving the performance of urban school districts is more difficult today than it was several decades ago. Yet economic and social changes make performance improvement especially important today. Two quite different bodies of research provide...