Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United…

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is an essential lifeline for millions of Americans. Without it, many families would be in deep financial distress. SSDI is insurance that workers pay for through premiums deducted from their pay. In return, workers gain the right to monthly benefits if a disabling condition ends their capacity to earn a…

Obesity is epidemic in the United States, and there is an imperative need to identify policy tools that may help fight this epidemic. A recent paper in the economics literature finds an inverse relationship between gasoline prices and obesity risk--suggesting that increased gasoline prices via higher gasoline taxes may have the effect of reducing…

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school…

Burkhauser and Daly claim that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is growing at an unsustainable rate and has depressed employment rates and incomes of people with disabilities following enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. In the authors' view, SSDI is sustainable and affordable, despite increasing prevalence of…

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is growing at an unsustainable pace. Over the past 40 years the number of disabled worker beneficiaries has increased nearly sixfold, rising from 1.5 million in 1970 to 8.2 million in 2010. Rapid growth in the rolls has put increasing pressure on program finances. The rapid rise in SSDI…

Owen-Smith et al. (this issue) answer the question about expanding funding for human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) research decisively and emphatically. They conclude that the U.S. federal government should expand funding in volume and scope, and stabilize it through regularity. According to Hurlbut and Robert, If the clear goal of policy should…

This paper articulates a citation-based approach to science policy evaluation and employs that approach to investigate the impact of the United States' 2001 policy regarding the federal funding of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. We evaluate the impact of the policy on the level of U.S. hESC research, the U.S. position at the knowledge…

Innovation inducement prizes have been used for centuries. In the United States, a recent federal policy change--the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010--clarified and simplified a path by which all federal agencies can offer innovation inducement prizes, thus intensifying interest in how government agencies can most effectively design…

About 75 percent of U.S.-trained, noncitizen PhDs in science and engineering work in the United States after graduation, and 54 percent of those who stay take postdoctoral positions. The probability of postdoctoral participation is substantially higher for temporary visa holders than for permanent visa holders because of visa-related restrictions…

All industrialized countries are grappling with a common problem--how to provide assistance of various kinds to their rapidly aging populations. The problem for countries searching for models of efficient and high-quality long-term care (LTC) policies is that fewer than a dozen countries have government-organized, formal LTC policies. Relatively…

Slow economic growth since the end of the U.S. recession in June of 2009 has not yet translated into increases in employment large enough to meaningfully reduce the rate of unemployment. Because expansionary macroeconomic policy has been pursued on both the fiscal and monetary fronts, it appears at first glance that the hands of government at this…

Since U.S. economic growth began to slow in 2006, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have enacted a number of fairly costly programs designed to stimulate the economy and employment growth. Because many of these programs are fairly new, there has been little comprehensive examination of their impacts, but initial analysis suggests that these…

Comparing the papers on the Korean and the U.S. situations leads to interesting conclusions. Cho and Shin argue that the recent crisis did not create huge problems in the labor market because Korea was firstly in a fundamentally sound economic situation and secondly took adequate anti-crisis measures, in particular by stabilizing internal demand.…

In this paper, the authors first discuss the Neumark and Troske piece, and then compare the U.S. context to that in Europe and Korea, as described by the Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench and the Cho and Shin contributions. Although they are in basic agreement with Neumark and Troske on the extent and depth of the current employment situation, they…