Turner provides a thorough overview of defined benefit, defined contribution, and hybrid retirement plans; describes the problems inherent in the current pension system; and presents possible solutions to those problems. In doing so, he approaches pension policy from a key perspective, the international perspective.

Led by Nobel laureate James J. Heckman, the authors draw on a variety of superior data sources to explore how performance standards and incentives influence the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants in U.S. employment and training programs.

When a group of anonymous donors announced in 2005 that they would send every graduate of this midsized public school district to college for free, few within or outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, understood the magnitude of the gesture. Now, in the first comprehensive account of the Kalamazoo Promise, Michelle Miller-Adams charts its initial impact as well as its potential to bring about fundamental economic and social change in a community hurt by job loss, depopulation, and racial segregation.

This book affords a better understanding of the consequences of long-term unemployment and the policies that are needed to address it. The contributors present research that examines the psychological as well as economic consequences of experiencing a prolonged spell of joblessness. Included are discussions of policies to increase job creation and to get the long-term unemployed back into jobs.

"Optimal social security design needs to look at the tradeoff between risk and return of retirement benefits. Munnell and Sass provide an excellent and lucid exposition of the issues which arise when seeking higher returns through riskier benefit designs. This is the book to turn to in order to review international experience so as to understand the pluses and minuses of equities." –J. Michael Orszag, Head of Research, Watson Wyatt LLP

This book provides a detailed insider's view under the Clinton and Bush administrations of the process by which eight social science experiments influenced federal laws and policies to alleviate joblessness in the United States. These experiments, each of which focused on returning unemployed workers to work, are analyzed through their entire policy process: experiment initiation, implementation, and evaluation; policy development; legislative enactment; program development; and program implementation.

The contributors to this book provide a provocative assessment of the effectiveness of various policies and practices designed to help disadvantaged segments of our population overcome the obstacles in their path to upward economic mobility.

Lazonick explores the origins of the new era of employment insecurity and income inequality, and considers what governments, businesses, and individuals can do about it. He also asks whether the United States can refashion its high-tech business model to generate stable and equitable economic growth.

Maxwell presents the results of her groundbreaking survey of 405 employers, which queried them about jobs requiring no more than a high school education and no more than one year of work experience. These data allow her to establish the link between skills and low-skilled jobs and to reveal the current state of the labor market facing low-skilled workers. The data also highlights the knowledge and skills that employers require in low-skilled jobs and the abilities that individuals who apply for those jobs bring to the table.

Basing their analysis on the American Time Use Survey, Connelly and Kimmel delve into the time use of mothers of preteenaged children in the United States and connect their time uses with their childrens development. This leads to interesting findings that should inform policymakers addressing issues related to taxation, education, and child care subsidies.