The Urban Institute has tracked job trends for four decades, following unskilled workers during the 1990s boom, welfare leavers taking jobs, and, more recently, older workers during the recession. Our experts study workforce development, disability and employment, and the low-skill labor market. Read more.
Amid much conversation about the future of Social Security, personal retirement savings are becoming more critical than ever before. Many employers contribute to their workers' retirement savings, but who benefits most from this and how much do these people lose in wages as a result of these contributions? Karen Smith, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute's Program on Retirement Policy, talks about employer contributions to retirement savings, who benefits most, and who loses the most wages in return for retirement contributions.
The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.
The Urban Institute's MetroTrends research team has created an interactive map that reveals the relative employment strength in 16 job sectors for the nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas. A brief commentary by Graham MacDonald accompanies the map.
The High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI) was a national grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA). Between 2001 and 2007, more than 160 grants were awarded to establish industry-focused job training and related projects designed to meet the industry’s workforce challenges. This report is the third and final in a series from the national evaluation of the HGJTI conducted by the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Capital Research Corporation. This report documents the national initiative, describes the structure and implementation of projects by selected grantees, and provides nonexperimental analysis of the early impacts of job training in selected HGJTI-funded programs. The analysis relies on a review of grant applications and quarterly reports; visits to nine selected grantee sites; data collected from grantee training programs; quarterly earnings data from state unemployment insurance wage records; and administrative data from state and local public workforce system agencies.
The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Recently, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet follows trends in retirement account balances since the beginning of 2005.
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