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As thousands of military veterans return from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and seek to enter the civilian labor market, providing effective employment and training services to veterans is becoming increasingly important.

The report of a study first to examine the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA’s) Federal Agency Targeting (FEDTARG) inspection program. Under the FEDTARG program, OSHA targets Federal worksites that have high lost time case (LTC) counts. The goal of the program is to reduce hazards, injuries and illnesses, and the costs associated with injuries and illnesses in Federal worksites.

The report describes the use of administrative data to describe the characteristics, services received, and short-term labor market outcomes of adult Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Indian and Native American, and migrant and seasonal farmworker customers leaving four workforce investment programs in 2011.

Typically, unemployed workers who have met their state’s eligibility criteria for benefits can receive up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which are intended to provide a financial cushion while the workers adapt to the loss of a job and household income. These state-funded benefits, often referred to as regular Unemployment Insurance (UI), are available regardless of the strength of the economy.

For many Americans, the recession that began in 2007 led not only to job loss, but also to losing health insurance for themselves and their families. Three-quarters of nonelderly Americans who have health insurance receive coverage through an employer. In most cases, the employer pays for a relatively large portion of the cost of the coverage. Given the predominance of health insurance that is sponsored and subsidized by employers, the loss of a job is often accompanied by the loss of health care coverage.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) runs a voluntary program that provides free and confidential advice to small and medium-sized establishments on approaches to avoiding workplace injuries and illnesses. This effort, known as the On-site Consultation Program (OSC), operates in addition to—but totally separate from—OSHA’s enforcement activities. Nationwide, OSC performs approximately 27,000 consultation visits per year at establishments that collectively employ more than 1.25 million workers.

The report describes an exploratory investigation that contrasts the experiences of Jobs for Veterans State Grants (JVSG) veterans, non-JVSG veterans, and non-veterans who participated in federally-funded employment services. It examines employment rates, earnings, duration in employment services, and how quickly customers receive staff-assisted services. Comparisons were also made across gender, age, and military separation status.

The Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) works with other Department of Labor (DOL) agencies to conduct Administrative Data Research and Analysis (ADRA) studies. The various studies aim to examine administrative data sets from agencies within DOL and other federal agencies to provide timely responses to changing strategic agency priorities. Completed studies are listed below. New and ongoing studies will occur regularly.

In 2015, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and funded Summit Consulting LLC to conduct the Federal Agency Targeting Inspection (FEDTARG) Program Study under the Administrative Data Research and Analysis portfolio of studies. The outcome evaluation aims to better understand activities, outputs, and outcomes of the FEDTARG program from fiscal year (FY) 2008 through FY 2013.

The report summarizes the results of Eastern Research Group, Inc. (ERG)’s project to estimate the social and economic effects of minimum wage violations in California and New York. This project represented an exploratory effort to determine the appropriate approach and data to use to estimate the impacts of state and federal minimum wage and overtime pay violations; however, data limitations related to overtime pay violations required a focus only on minimum wage violations.

Abstract of the Social and Economic Effects of Wage Violations: Estimates for California and New York Final Report.

The report provides an overview of the Site Specific Targeting Program (SST11) and a random assignment evaluation design implemented by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to assess the short-term impacts of the program.

The paper describes the New Mexico Pay Equity Initiative, which was instituted by Governor Bill Richardson’s administration over a two year period (2009-2011). The Initiative built on recommendations from an Equal Pay Task Force created by the New Mexico State legislature in 2003, and a subsequent task force created by the governor in 2008.

The minimum wage is one of the most researched areas in labor economics with a vast body of literature that dates back nearly seventy years (Brown 1999). Research proliferated as variation in state minimum wage policies gained steam over the last several decades. However, research, debate and policy has largely ignored the lesser known subminimum wage received by tipped workers (also referred to as the tipped or cash wage). That there are two federal wage floors is unknown to many and the existence of the federal subminimum wage—at $2.13 since 1991—often comes as a bit of a surprise.

Family leave provides an employee with a period of time off work to care for a newborn or a sick child, spouse, or parent. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires that employers provide 12 weeks of family leave to qualifying workers with a newborn or a sick child, spouse, or parent, but that leave is unpaid.

In the fall of 2010, the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) contracted with IMPAQ International, LLC and its partners, Battelle Memorial Institute and Decision Information Resources, Inc., to conduct a process study of the Job Corps program to explore and identify center-level practices that are associated with center performance outcomes.

In the paper, the researcher leverages variation in response to a statewide full-day kindergarten policy to explore the effects of full-day kindergarten expansions on student academic performance—as measured by school-level standardized test scores—in first and third grade and on women’s labor force participation, measured by county-level employment statistics.

The empirical literature on union effects on occupational safety and health within firms struggles with two primary obstacles to credibly estimating the effect of unionization on workplace safety. First, unionized employees may be more likely to report occupational risks to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), inducing greater rates of inspection and citation of unionized firms for violations than occurs in otherwise similar nonunion firms. This is a kind of measurement error in commonly-used workplace safety outcomes that is positively correlated with unionization.

In the paper, researchers exploit data from the 1986–87 Washington Alternative Work Search experiment (merged with nine years of follow-up administrative wage records) to estimate the causal effects of eliminating the unemployment insurance (UI) work search requirement (WSR) on duration of non-employment, tenure with first post-claim employer, number of post-claim employers, long-term earnings, employment, and hours worked. For UI claimants as a whole, they find that eliminating the WSR had little influence, either positive or negative, on long-term post-claim outcomes.

The underreporting of occupational injuries and illnesses to worker protection agencies has become a topic of great concern to researchers and policymakers. Although numerous studies have quantified the prevalence of the phenomenon, which specific types of injuries and establishments are most susceptible to underreporting is poorly understood. As a consequence, regulators have very little capacity to “red flag” employers that are likely to underreport the most injuries. The paper begins to fill this gap in existing literature in four interrelated ways.

The brief presents high-level findings from the Using Administrative Data to Address Federal Contractor Violations of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws Final Report.

The report describes a study that uses administrative data from the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) on reviews of federal contractors that closed between fiscal years 2003 and 2012 to examine trends in, and factors associated with, violations and re-violations of equal employment opportunity laws and the effectiveness of remedies and press releases to deter re-violations.

The report describes a study that examines the characteristics of workers’ compensation claims, case management indicators, and work outcomes using administrative data on the cases reported under the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) from 2005 to 2010.

In 2013, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and funded Mathematica Policy Research to create Using Administrative Data to Address Federal Contractor Violations of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws under the Administrative Data Research and Analysis portfolio of studies.