Synthesizing previous CEPR research, this report uses a new methodology to better assess the economic security of working families. Rather than using the federal poverty line as a metric for a family's economic hardship, the authors of this report use basic family budgets and consider the role...

Some economic observers argue “structural unemployment” has increased in the wake of the Great Recession, but in this paper we find little support for either of two arguments that suggest that structural unemployment has been on the rise. The first argument focuses on the large increase in...

This report reviews unionization rates, the size and composition of the unionized workforce, and the wage and benefit advantage for union workers in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia, using the most recent data available and focusing on the period 2003-2009. Pooling data from...

This paper reviews the recent labor-market performance of 21 rich countries, with a focus on Denmark and Germany. Denmark, which was widely seen as one of the world's most successful labor markets before the downturn, has struggled in recent years. Germany, however, has outperformed the rest of...

This paper outlines a proposal for a system of work sharing that would give employers an incentive to maintain workers on their payroll at reduced hours as an alternative to laying them off. The system would be attached to the existing system of unemployment compensation, with shorttime...

About 7.4 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) work in the United States, making up 5.3 percent of the total U.S. workforce. About 7.1 million of these AAPI workers are Asian Americans; about 300,000 are Pacific Islanders. The AAPI workforce is almost 20 times larger today than...

The paper studies simple strategies of labor tax reform in a search and matching model of the labor market featuring endogenous labor supply.Changing the composition of the tax wedge|that is, reducing a payroll tax and increasing a progressive wage tax such that the marginal tax wedge remains...

Abstract: With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design,...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of different types of active labor market policies (ALMP).In our empirical analysis we use data on 20 OECD countries covering the time period 1985-1999.We find that labor market training is the most effective program to bring down...