In the past year, cash-strapped districts have been handing out pink slips by the hundreds, and some, by the thousands. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nearly 60,000 teachers were laid off in 2009. State budget gaps and deficit projections, with federal stimulus funding already spent, suggest more of the same for 2010. Some observers…

The Great Recession left a crater in the labor market that has been devastating for unemployed Americans of all ages. After more than two years of unemployment at well over 8%, there is a hole of more than 11 million jobs, with average spells of unemployment lasting nearly nine months. The weak labor market has been particularly tough on young…

In 2004 NCVER invited proposals from a consortia of researchers to address questions relating to changing work skill needs and work organisation arrangements and their implications for the vocational education and training sector. The National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, and the Centre for Post-compulsory Education and…

Employment opportunities for persons with doctoral degrees in counselor education and counseling psychology were studied. Over 15 months, 708 positions were identified and analyzed to determine frequency of advertised positions calling for either degree, types of positions, and references to the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related…

High rates of unemployment in rural areas poses questions as what education can do with the problem. This report examines the effects of rural American economies as they grow away from agriculture and toward dependence on manufacturing and service industries. Using data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' Displaced Worker Survey, the…

An analysis of the economic returns of education in Australia finds a rising need for education at a time of diminishing apparent returns. It is proposed that the notions of credentialism and education as a positional good provide a better explanation for this phenomenon than does the human capital approach. (MSE)

The proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will result in lower wages, fewer jobs, and generally reduced living standards for the majority of U.S. workers. Substantial costs to the U.S. economy will occur in job and income loss and few off-setting benefits for most workers. Proponents argue that NAFTA will create upward mobility for…

Employing two widely used approaches to identify the effects of monetary policy, this paper explores the differential impact of policy on the labor market outcomes of teenagers, minorities, out-of-school youth, and less-skilled individuals. Evidence from recursive vector autoregressions and autoregressive distributed lag models that use…

A study examined the earnings losses suffered by a group of experienced workers who separated from their firms in the early and mid-1980s. The quarterly earnings histories of a large number of Pennsylvania workers covering the period 1974 through 1986 merged with employment information about their firms served as the data set. Workers' earnings…

A labor market-oriented study of the effects of internationalization provided background for National Commission for Employment Policy (NCEP) recommendations on ways to enhance the ability of the U.S. economy to compete in world markets. The analysis focuses on three major dimensions: (1) trade in goods and services; (2) immigrants (legal and…

In the classic employment contract, especially at large companies, wages were not strongly responsive to the labor market. Instead, individual companies had distinctive company wage levels and patterns. An exhaustive study of employers and employees in the United States and Japan examined whether the "old employment contract" has been…

A study examined the experiences of some 1.4 million American defense industry workers, displaced in the wake of the Cold War, as a way of reviewing and evaluating national policies toward worker adjustment and re-employment as they have evolved in the 1990s. The study found that the federal government, through the Department of Labor,…