Resource Library

Improving career readiness and job access for youth and young adults is vital. Millions of low-income Americans need better access to high-quality career pathways to escape poverty. This is no easy task— economic opportunity has shrunk dramatically in the United States in the past half-century (Chetty et al. 2016). Meanwhile, employers face rising shortages in the supply of skilled workers, making it harder to compete on the global market (World Economic Forum 2021).

Appendices to the Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Youth Use of Workforce Services in Virtual Contexts Final Report: Appendix A: Resources for Learning More About Behavioral Insights and How to Use Them for Continuous Improvement, Appendix B: Supplementary Details on Study Context and Design, Appendix C: Technical Details on Impact Estimates, and References.

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA), Office of Workforce Investment (OWI) supports state and local workforce agencies in providing information to help job seekers successfully search for work. As part of this support, OWI asked the DOL Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) and the DOL Behavioral Interventions (DOL BI) team to explore whether applications of behavioral science could improve the usefulness of the information that job seekers use when searching for positions, investing in training, and considering career options.

The paper examines the effect of increasing the size of unemployment insurance (UI) transfers on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in the U.S. from April 5 to May 2, 2020. As part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act signed on March 27th, 2020, the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program increased UI payments by $600 per week (Courtney, 2020). It took states different amounts of time to comply with the U.S.

In the paper, the researcher aimed to study the major predictors of disability onset for older workers in the United States and the role of various employer accommodations in retaining newly disabled workers in the workforce using nationally representative data.

Are female, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian claimants for unemployment insurance (UI) more likely than white non-Hispanic claimants to see their claims disputed by an employer? And are these UI claimants ultimately more likely to have their UI claims denied, either by the UI agency or following a dispute? In the paper, the researchers address these questions by examining UI administrative wage and claim records from Washington state during 2005:Q1–2013:Q4.

The paper presents how the researcher conducted a study to examine the association between labor market changes and disability among working-age Americans at the county-level. The researcher theorized that deindustrialization—or the decline of industrial capacity due to social and economic change—created a polarized workforce in which economic and social circumstances are driving up rates of disability among marginalized American workers affected by these changing conditions.

The paper documents key patterns of community-level disparities in access to unemployment insurance (UI) during the pandemic. To operationalize the notion of access to UI, researchers rely on a comprehensive conceptual framework that allows them to track a jobless worker’s access to UI benefits across three discrete stages in the lifecycle of a potential UI claim. To document the degrees of disparities in access throughout the lifecycle of a UI claim, the analysis develops and compares measures for each stage of access both across states and at more local levels within California.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) H-2A guest worker program plays a critical role in supporting agricultural employment and production in the United States. Under Executive Order 13985, President Joe Biden has provided an opportunity for federal agencies to assess equity challenges under their purview. In this report, the researchers investigate equity issues related to legal oversight of the H-2A program.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides eligible employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year. Existing evidence has documented that FMLA is associated with higher leave-taking and improved maternal and child health.