The share of Americans with defined contribution pension plans now exceeds the share of those with defined benefit plans. Wolff refers to this as the "great transformation" and it leads him to examine recent evidence to see whether there are winners and losers resulting from this switch away from traditional pension plans.

Feldman presents a case study of how New York City's welfare-to-work programs were managed and implemented in the mid-2000s. It is a performance analysis, using both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the operations and performance of 26 nonprofit and for-profit welfare-to-work programs. The book draws on individual-level data on more than 14,000 participants, and the use of nonsystematic assignment of clients creates a natural experiment that assists in comparing program performance.

This book offers a comprehensive look at an industry whose role in motor vehicle production in the United States has been growing. Klier and Rubenstein make use of a unique database containing information on thousands of parts plants in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This allows them to produce an analysis of the motor vehicle parts supplier industry at a level of detail not seen before. It also allows them to meet the two main goals they set out to achieve. The first is to present the key characteristics of the vast network of parts suppliers. The second goal of the book is to describe the changing geography of U.S. motor vehicle production at the local, regional, national, and international levels. In doing that, Klier and Rubenstein illustrate the challenges in store for motor vehicle parts production in the United States and especially in the Midwest.

Douglas J. Besharov and Phoebe H. Cottingham present a group papers that provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date look yet at WIAs program performance and impact. The papers were commissioned for a meeting held with staff of the European Commission for a discussion of WIA lessons and the implications for future workforce programming in the United States as well as Europe. They are organized into five areas: 1) understanding WIA, 2) program implementation, 3) performance management, 4) impact evaluations, and 5) future evaluation choices. In addition, they detail how WIA performance management systems function and present various evaluation techniques for assessing workforce programs.

In "Working after Welfare," we experience the day-to-day struggles that single mothers face and the reasons they tend to remain in low-wage, dead-end jobs.