To promote workforce development at home and abroad, RAND Education and Labor helps public and private sector decisionmakers understand how to keep workers productive, knowledgeable, and engaged.
RAND Education and Labor researchers conduct wide-ranging research on labor markets—analyzing wages, employment, demographics, and other dynamics; making informed projections of skill demand; identifying constraints on growth; and recommending pathways to progress. Our recent work includes assessments of the health of Mongolia's labor market, informal sector growth in Bangladesh, manufacturing in India, and tourism in California.
RAND Education and Labor researchers identify the most optimal ways to prepare tomorrow's workers to compete in the globally connected workplace, to enhance the skills of current workers, and to integrate disadvantaged populations into the workforce. Our recent research in this area includes helping to reduce youth unemployment in targeted countries, boosting employment among U.S. veterans, connecting the unemployed with jobs in New Orleans, supporting the welfare-to-work transitions of low-income parents in California, and training workers for jobs in the energy sector in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
Following workers' compensation reforms in California, workers with low back injuries received less medical care, leading to an 8% drop in post-injury earnings relative to other injured workers. These results suggest that medical spending can impact health and that health affects labor outcomes.
Constructs more robust latent trait measures of language fluency using well-established psychometric methods, and re-evaluates the evidence for the wage premium.
The results of this study provide unique information on individuals' responses to a Social Security reform that would implement a 30 percent cut in benefits.
Our results suggest that layoffs and business closure have truly distinct effects on health.
This paper uses a unique administrative database collected by the U.S. Department of Labor from 2002-09 to examine whether reservation wages fall as workers wait longer to apply for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.
The author analyzes how unemployment insurance (UI) affects on-the-job search among older workers in the United States, allowing for job insecurity.
Many government and private-sector efforts support veterans' transition to civilian jobs, but their impact is unclear. RAND hosted two workshops to recommend improvements to veteran employment opportunities and identify research gaps.
Generalizes the case study synthetic control estimator to permit estimation of the effect of multiple treatment variables, which can be discrete or continuous, then estimates the impact of the minimum wage on the employment rate of teenagers.
Uses comprehensive administrative social security records data on the universe of Austrian workers to identify and precisely estimate the elasticity of disability insurance claiming with respect to benefit generosity in the United States.
