Labor Policy Research

Reports

• "Evidence Scan of Work Experience Programs.” Samina Sattar, May 2010. This report presents evidence on the effectiveness of interventions that include work experience as a strategy to improve employment outcomes for people with barriers to employment. The report reviews 26 years of rigorous research gathering information from 27 evaluations. The author distinguishes between interventions targeting adults versus youth, paid versus unpaid work, and length of work opportunity.
• “Reinvesting in America’s Youth: Lessons from the 2009 Recovery Act Summer Youth Employment Initiative.” Jeanne Bellotti, Linda Rosenberg, Samina Sattar, Andrea Mraz Esposito, and Jessica Ziegler, February 2010. This report examines implementation of the 2009 summer youth employment initiative, which placed more than 314,000 youth in summer jobs. As part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), states received $1.2 billion to fund employment and training targeted to disadvantaged youth, a group particularly hard hit by the recession. The report also details the national context for implementation, describes the experiences of 20 selected local areas, and presents lessons for future summer youth employment efforts.
• “Growing America Through Entrepreneurship: Findings from the Evaluation of Project GATE.” Jacob Benus, Sheena McConnell, Jeanne Bellotti, Theodore Shen, Kenneth Fortson, and Daver Kahvecioglu, May 2008. While many Americans dream about starting their own business and have the motivation to do so, lack of business expertise and access to credit often prevent them from realizing their dreams. Project GATE (Growing America Through Entrepreneurship) was implemented to help emerging entrepreneurs create, sustain, and/or expand their existing small business. In seven demonstration sites in Minnesota, Maine, and Pennsylvania, approximately 4,000 individuals applied for services between fall 2003 and summer 2005. Findings from a random assignment evaluation show that Project GATE increased the proportion of business ownership. However, earnings were not significantly higher among Project GATE participants compared to their control group counterparts.
• “Effects of Employment on Marriage: Evidence from a Randomized Study of the Job Corps Program.” Arif Mamun, December 2008. This report explores the effects of employment and earnings on the likelihood of marriage for young economically disadvantaged men and women. The study exploits the change in employment resulting from random assignment to the Job Corps program to identify the effect of employment on the likelihood of marriage. The key finding of this study is that an increase in employment and earnings has positive effects on the likelihood of marriage for women, but has no significant effect for men.
• “Kauffman Firm Survey: Results from the Baseline and First Follow-Up Surveys.” Janice Ballou, Tom Barton, David DesRoches, Frank Potter, E.J. Reedy, Alicia Robb, Scott Shane, and Zhanyun Zhao, March 2008. The Kauffman Firm Survey is a panel study of 4,928 businesses founded in 2004 that are being tracked annually over their first eight years. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity, characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses. It also looks at the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of these businesses, as well as the characteristics of their founders. This report highlights findings from the first two years. Nearly 60 percent of the businesses had no employees in their first year. Just under three-fourths had one employee or less, while about one-quarter had two or more employees. Nearly 70 percent of businesses were owned by men and slightly more than 30 percent were owned by women. Slightly fewer than 9 percent of firms closed in calendar year 2005, and the survival rates vary by owner demographics. For example, only 88 percent of black-owned businesses survived, compared with 92 percent of white-owned businesses and 91 percent of Asian-owned businesses.
• "Giving Ex-Offenders a Choice in Life: First Findings from the Beneficiary Choice Demonstration." Jeanne Bellotti, Michelle Derr, and Nora Paxton, December 2008. In July 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor funded the Beneficiary Choice Contracting Program, a demonstration to help young, recently released ex-offenders successfully enter and remain in the workforce and stay free of crime. The program is being implemented by grantees in five locations: Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Des Moines. The model involves three unique components: (1) emphasis on participant choice of service providers, (2) expansion of the service delivery network to include faith-based and community organizations that offer a range of secular and faith-infused services, and (3) use of performance-based contracting to motivate providers to achieve key outcomes. This report describes early implementation experiences. The analysis relies on qualitative data collected during the first round of site visits, a survey of grantees and their service providers, and data from the demonstration’s management information system. As of August 2008, the five grantees had enrolled 763 participants across their 30 specialized service providers. Although the demonstration was still in its infancy at the time of the site visits, many interesting patterns had already emerged as sites entered uncharted territory by combining the indirect funding mechanism of customer choice with use of performance-based contracting.

Journal Articles

• "Low Skilled Immigration and Work-Fertility Tradeoffs Among High Skilled US Natives." Delia Furtado and Heinrich Hock, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, May 2010. This article examines the impact of low skilled immigration on the childbearing and labor supply decisions of high-education female natives of the United States. The authors find that an influx of low skilled immigrants to a city attenuates the negative relationship between female labor force participation (LFP) and fertility, leading to an increase in the proportion of women that both work and have a young child in the home. The authors argue that the smaller LFP-fertility tradeoff attributable to immigrant workers arises due to reductions in cost of childrearing. Whereas most immigration research focuses on the reduced employment prospects of natives, this paper considers the potential benefits of immigration to high skilled native women.
• "Does Job Corps Work? Impact Findings from the National Job Corps Study." Peter Z. Schochet, John Burghardt and Sheena McConnell, American Economic Review (subscription required), December 2008. This paper presents findings from an experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation’s largest training program for disadvantaged youths. The study used survey data collected over four years, as well as tax data collected over nine years, for a nationwide sample of 15,400 treatments and controls. The Job Corps model has promise; program participation increases educational attainment, reduces criminal activity, and increases earnings for several postprogram years. Based on tax data, however, the earnings gains were not sustained except for the oldest participants.
• “Do Job Corps Performance Measures Track Program Impacts?” Peter Z. Schochet and John Burghardt, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (subscription required), summer 2008. This article examines the association between program performance measures and long-term program impacts, using nine-year follow-up data from a recent large-scale national experimental evaluation of Job Corps, the nation’s largest federal job training program for disadvantaged youths. The authors note that impacts on key outcomes are not associated with center performance levels. Participants in higher-performing centers had better outcomes; however, the same pattern held for controls. The program’s performance measurement system is not achieving the goal of ranking and rewarding centers on the basis of their ability to improve participant outcomes relative to what these outcomes would have been otherwise.
• "Using Propensity Scoring to Estimate Program-Related Subgroup Impacts in Experimental Program Evaluations." Peter Z. Schochet and John Burghardt. Evaluation Review (subscription required), March 2007. This article discusses the use of propensity scoring in experimental program evaluations to estimate impacts for subgroups defined by program features and participants' program experiences. The authors discuss estimation issues, provide specification tests, and review an overlooked data collection design—obtaining predictions that program intake staff make about applicants' likely assignments and experiences—that could improve the quality of matched comparison samples. They demonstrate the approach's effectiveness in producing credible subgroup findings using data from Mathematica's Job Corps evaluation.