Burt S. Barnow is associate director for research and a principal research scientist at the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Barnow has over 25 years experience as an economist and manager of research projects in program evaluation, performance analysis, labor economics, welfare, poverty, child support, fatherhood, marriage, and employment. Before joining the Institute for Policy Studies in 1992, Dr. Barnow spent eight years at the Lewin Group and nearly nine years in the U.S. Department of Labor. He has published widely in the fields of labor economics and evaluation, including Improving the Odds: Publicly Funded Training in a Changing Labor Market (edited with Christopher T. King, Urban Institute Press, 2000) and Evaluating Comprehensive State Welfare Reform: The Wisconsin Works Program (edited with Thomas Kaplan and Robert Moffitt, Rockefeller Institute Press, 2000).
Dan Bloom is director of the welfare and barriers to employment policy area at MDRC. He has directed three large-scale evaluations of state welfare reform waiver projects, and he is currently helping manage both the multisite Employment Retention and Advancement evaluation and the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ project. He has written more than 20 research reports, as well as a book—After AFDC: Welfare-to-Work Choices and Challenges for States (MDRC, 1997)—summarizing lessons learned from studies of welfare-to-work programs. He was a member of the team that developed the Parents’ Fair Share Demonstration, and he managed MDRC’s evaluation of Ohio’s Learning, Earnings and Parenting (LEAP) program. He previously worked for America Works and for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
George J. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Borjas’s books include Wage Policy in the Federal Bureaucracy (American Enterprise Institute, 1980); three editions of Labor Economics (McGraw-Hill, 1996, 2000, 2005), and Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999). He has published more than 100 articles in books and scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His articles and editorials also appear regularly in major magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Le Monde.
Gary Burtless holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where he has been a scholar since 1981. He researches issues associated with public finance, aging, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government tax and transfer policy. Burtless is coauthor of Globaphobia: Confronting Fears about Open Trade (1998); Five Years After: The Long Term Effects of Welfare-to-Work Programs (1995), Growth with Equity: Economic Policymaking for the Next Century (1993), and Can America Afford to Grow Old? Paying for Social Security (1989). He also edited and contributed to Aging Societies: The Global Dimension (1998), and Does Money Matter? The Effect of School Resources on Student Achievement and Adult Success (1996), among other works.
David Butler is a vice president of MDRC and director of the welfare and barriers to employment policy area. He directs the development and implementation of MDRC demonstration projects and leads the organization’s technical assistance work. He currently manages the launch of a major new initiative, Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ. With a special interest in transitional employment programs, Butler has directed operations of major projects, including the Jobs-Plus Community Revitalization Initiative for Public Housing Residents, the project on Devolution and Urban Change, the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies, and the Employment Retention and Advancement project. Before joining MDRC, Butler served as deputy commissioner for planning for New York City’s Human Resource Administration.
Richard B. Freeman is a professor in economics at Harvard University, Labor Studies Program Director at NBER, and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. His research interests include the job market for scientists and engineers; the growth and decline of unions; employee involvement programs; international labor markets; restructuring European welfare states; income distribution and equity in the marketplace; the effects of immigration and trade on inequality; international labor standards; Chinese labor markets; transitional economies; and the effects of the Internet on labor markets, social behavior, and the economy.
Robert I. Lerman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and professor of economics at American University, has conducted research and policy analyses on a wide range of issues involving employment, family structure, income support, and youth development, especially as they affect low-income populations. In the 1970s, he worked on reforming national income maintenance programs and on youth employment policies as staff economist for both the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and the U.S. Department of Labor. Dr. Lerman was one of the first scholars to examine the patterns and economic determinants of unwed fatherhood and to propose a youth apprenticeship strategy in the United States. His currently researches the interactions between men’s marital status and labor market outcomes and the impact of public and private initiatives to strengthen marriage.
Alicia H. Munnell is the Peter Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at the Carroll School of Management and the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Professor Munnell spent most of her professional career at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she became senior vice president and director of research in 1984. During the 1990s, she served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy. Professor Munnell was co-founder and first president of the National Academy of Social Insurance and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Pension Research Council at Wharton.
Paul Osterman is the Nanyang Professor of Human Resources at the Sloan School of Management and the Department of Urban Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also deputy dean of the Sloan School. Dr. Osterman has written four books, including Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003) and Securing Prosperity: How the American Labor Market Has Changed and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 1999). He has also cowritten and edited several volumes, including Working in America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market and Internal Labor Markets. In addition, Dr. Osterman has written numerous academic journal articles and policy issue papers on such topics as the organization of work within firms, labor market policy, and economic development.
Sarah Turner is an associate professor of education and economics at the University of Virginia. She is also a research affiliate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Dr. Turner specializes in research on the economics of education in the United States. She has written extensively on the economics of higher education, including the behavioral effects of financial aid policies and the entry of new providers. She is currently collaborating with John Bound on a Russell Sage Foundation–supported project analyzing mobility of college-educated workers using U.S. census data.
Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work and a research associate at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics. She currently studies family leave, inequality in early childhood care and education, and child abuse and neglect. Dr. Waldfogel is a member of the (U.K.) Advisory Committee for the National Evaluation of Sure Start and was a member of the (U.S.) National Academy of Science’s Committee on Family and Work Policies. Her books include What Children Need (Harvard University Press, 2006), The Future of Child Protection: How to Break the Cycle of Abuse and Neglect (Harvard University Press, 1998), and Securing the Future: Investing in Children from Birth to Adulthood (edited with Sheldon Danziger, Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).
