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Labor: Latest Work
Reports | Journal Articles
Reports |
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| "Collaborating with Faith- and Community-Based Organizations: Lessons Learned from 12 Workforce Investment Boards." Diane Paulsell, Jeffrey Max, Michelle Derr, and Andrew Burwick, May 2007. Faith-based and community organizations have the potential to be valuable partners in the workforce investment system. This report presents findings from Mathematica’s evaluation of grants to Workforce Investment Boards to increase the number of faith-based and community organizations providing services in the One-Stop system. The grants are also intended to expand One-Stop access to groups that have not traditionally used this service. The report notes that faith-based and community organizations can extend the workforce system’s reach to underserved populations, provide services tailored to meet the needs of hard-to-serve job seekers, help people with significant barriers to employment find jobs, and leverage community resources.
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| "Managing Customers' Training Choices: Findings from the Individual Training Account Experiment." Sheena McConnell, Elizabeth Stuart, Kenneth Fortson, Paul Decker, Irma Perez-Johnson, Barbara Harris, and Jeffrey Salzman, December 2006. A key goal of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) is to provide people with choices in the types of services they receive. This goal was addressed by requiring that vouchers or individual training accounts (ITAs) be used for WIA-funded training. Workforce agencies were given a great deal of flexibility about how to implement ITAs, but had little information on which to base this choice. This report addresses this information need by presenting findings from an experimental evaluation of three approaches to implementing ITAs. The approaches varied by how much counseling was required, whether the counselor could veto a choice, and how the amount of the ITA was set. The evaluation examined the effect of each approach on the use of counseling, receipt of training, and employment and earnings outcomes. |
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| "Evaluation of the Military Base National Emergency Grants." Karen Needels, Jeanne Bellotti, Mina Dadgar, and Walter Nicholson, December 2006. The U.S. Department of Labor awards National Emergency Grants (NEGs) to states or local areas that need supplemental resources to provide workforce development services. This report summarizes an evaluation of NEGs to military communities to support U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) employment efforts—initially, to downsize and then, after the events of 9/11/2001 and the war in Afghanistan, to retain military personnel. Four types of clients were targeted for services: involuntarily separated military personnel, military spouses, DoD civilian personnel, and returning members of the National Guard and reserves. The evaluation looked at the program’s history and implementation; provided information about the makeup of the target populations, costs associated with serving them, services they received, and employment experiences of those exiting program services; and identified policy implications, such as how the workforce investment system might better serve military populations. |
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| "Implementing Personal Reemployment Accounts (PRAs): Early Experiences of the Seven Demonstration States.” Gretchen Kirby, September 2006. PRAs are a new strategy to help recipients of unemployment insurance build job skills and find work. PRAs combine individually managed accounts and bonuses of up to $3,000 for reemployment, to give unemployed workers flexibility in devising their own reemployment plan. This interim report highlights implementation experiences of PRA demonstration sites in seven states—Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Texas, and West Virginia. Early findings show that states have maintained a high degree of flexibility and customer choice in the use of PRAs by placing limited, if any, restrictions on recipients’ selection of training providers. States have also allowed recipients to purchase a broad range of supportive services that help sustain a job search. The analysis suggests that PRA recipients will restrict spending on services to maximize the amount of a reemployment bonus. But, when funds are used to purchase services, the majority of spending is directed to supportive services in five of the seven states. |
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| "Growing America Through Entrepreneurship: Interim Report." Jeanne Bellotti, Sheena McConnell, and Jacob Benus, August 2006. While many Americans dream about starting their own businesses, lack of business expertise and access to credit often prevent them from moving forward. Project GATE (Growing America Through Entrepreneurship) was designed to provide assessment, training, and technical assistance to individuals interested in starting or growing a small business. This report describes implementation, services provided, characteristics of people served, and similarities and differences across five demonstration sites. Findings suggest that Project GATE could be reproduced on a wider scale. |
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"The Quantum Opportunity Program Demonstration: Final Impacts." Allen Schirm, Elizabeth Stuart, and Allison McKie, July 2006. From 1995 to 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Ford Foundation ran a demonstration of the Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP), mainly an after-school program that also began offering intensive and comprehensive services to at-risk youth when they entered ninth grade. QOP’s goals were to increase rates of high school graduation and enrollment in postsecondary education or training; secondary goals included improving high school grades and achievement test scores and reducing risky behaviors, such as substance abuse, crime, and teen parenting. This final report from Mathematica's random assignment evaluation presents impacts on outcomes measured when most sample members were 22 to 25 years old. Overall, QOP did not achieve its primary or secondary objectives, but the lack of overall impacts masks some suggestive evidence of promising effects for some sites and subgroups.
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Journal Articles |
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| “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. |
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| "Using Propensity Scoring to Estimate Program-Related Subgroup Impacts in Experimental Program Evaluations." Peter Z. Schochet and John Burghardt. Evaluation Review, March 2007 (may require subscription). 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. |
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"Natives, the Foreign-Born, and High School Equivalents: New Evidence on the Returns to the GED.” Melissa A. Clark and David Jaeger, Journal of Population Economics, October 2006. This article explores the labor market returns to the General Education Development (GED) exam for U.S. natives and the foreign-born. The authors found that foreign-born men with a GED who received all of their formal schooling abroad earn significantly more than either foreign-schooled high school dropouts or graduates. In contrast, among U.S. natives, GED recipients earn less than high school graduates but significantly more than dropouts. The returns for natives become larger over the life cycle and are not due to cohort effects. The findings indicate that the GED may be more valuable in the labor market than some previous research suggests. Reprints available while supply lasts; call (609) 275-2350.
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