Resource Library

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.