In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other...

Temporary Help Services (THS) employment has been growing in size, particularly among disadvantaged workers, and in importance in balancing cyclical fluctuations in labor demand. Does THS employment provide some benefits to disadvantaged workers, or divert them from better jobs? We investigate...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) presents an opportunity to significantly improve compensation for American workers. A potential concern, though, is that employers will circumvent the employer mandate by increasing their use of workers in staffing arrangements that are not covered by the mandate:...

The temporary help industry, although small, plays a significant role in the macro economy, reflecting employers' growing reliance on temporary help agencies to provide flexibility in meeting staffing needs. Drawing on detailed temporary-help order data between 2007 and 2011 from a large,...