Featured Publications

The Teaching Penalty
For decades, researchers have asked whether teacher compensation has kept pace without side job opportunities, and whether compensation is sufficiently competitive to attract the quality of instructors desired. While the popular view is that teacher pay is relatively low and has not kept up with comparable professions over time, new claims suggest that teachers are actually well compensated when work hours, weeks of work, or benefits packages are taken into account.

The Teaching Penalty reviews recent analyses of relative teacher compensation and provides a detailed analysis of trends in the relative weekly pay of elementary and secondary school teachers. It finds that teacher compensation lags that of workers with similar education and experience, as well as that of workers with comparable skill requirements, like accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors. Incorporating benefits into the analysis does not alter the general picture of teachers having a substantial wage/pay disadvantage that eroded considerably over the last 10 years.

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Vouchers and Public School Performance
School choice and vouchers have become an increasingly important part of that educational reform policy debate. The debate is rooted in ideological differences between market proponents, who attach greater importance to individual choice, and supporters of a publicly run educational system, who place greater importance on equity, commonality, and public accountability. In a new book, Vouchers and Public School Performance, authors Martin Carnoy, Frank Adamson, Amita Chudgar, Thomas Luschei, and John Witte ask whether there is evidence that increased competition among schools introduced by a large-scale voucher plan in an urban school district, Milwaukee, resulted in improved student performance in public elementary schools. The study uses data from an extensive choice reform in Milwaukee's Public School District, a district with the typical educational problems of an American urban center, but unusual in that it has had a voucher plan targeted at low-income students since 1990—the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

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Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation
by Robert Lynch

Research is increasingly demonstrating that the policy of investing in high-quality prekindergarten programs provides a wide array of significant benefits to children, families, and society as a whole, including job creation, inequality reduction, education and health care improvement, and reduced crime rates. In a new EPI book, Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation: Public Investment in High-Quality Prekindergarten, Robert G. Lynch examines the costs and benefits of both a targeted and a universal prekindergarten program and shows the positive impact of these programs on the economy, federal and state budgets, crime, and the educational achievement and earnings of children and adults.

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Talking Past Each Other
by David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, Ruy Teixeira

In a series of focus groups in 2005 and 2006, EPI asked middle-class Americans to discuss their economic insecurities. The discussions revealed not only a profound ambivalence about the economy, but also a widening gap between the ways that everyday Americans and influential elites talk about the economy. Co-authored by David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira, Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don't Get) About the Economy discusses that gap and how to bridge it, allowing for changing economic, social, and political conditions. The study includes a special section that offers 12 suggestions for how to 'speak American' when talking about economics.

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The State of Working America 2006/2007
by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein , and Sylvia Allegretto

The Economic Policy Institute and Cornell University Press has released the final edition of The State of Working America 2006/2007.

Prepared biennially since 1988, EPI's flagship publication sums up the problems and challenges facing American working families, presenting a wide variety of data on family incomes, taxes, wages, unemployment, wealth, and poverty—data that enables the book's authors to closely examine the impact of the economy on the living standards of the American people. The State of Working America 2006/2007 is an exhaustive reference work that will be welcomed by anyone eager for a comprehensive portrait of the economic well-being of the nation.

The State of Working America 2006-2007 is now available for purchase.
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Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends
by Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy

In a knowledge-driven economy, those without at least a high school diploma will be far more limited in their work prospects than those with one. But scholars and educators disagree on the rate of graduation in U.S. high schools. Some new statistics seriously understate minority graduation rates and fail to reflect the tremendous progress in the last few decades in closing the black-white and the Hispanic-white graduation gaps. Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends analyzes the current sources of available data on high school completion and dropout rates and finds that, while graduation rates need much improvement, they are higher, and getting better.
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Bridging the Tax Gap
by Max B. Sawicky

The Internal Revenue Service estimates that as much as $350 billion in taxes are not paid voluntarily and on time. Much of this enormous gap can be attributed to offshore financial manipulations, abusive tax shelters, complexity of the tax code, and failure to implement basic financial reporting and withholding procedures. Compounding the compliance problem is the enforcement burden on an inadequately funded IRS. In this book, Bridging the Tax Gap: Addressing the Crisis in Federal Tax Administration, EPI economist Max B. Sawicky brings together eminent theorists and practitioners in the field of tax enforcement. Collectively, these experts provide an accessible overview of the crisis facing federal tax administration and discuss a wide range of practical solutions.
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All Together Now
by Jared Bernstein

All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy explores how modern-day hyper-individualism has trumped a sense of collaboration and joint responsibility and thus, distorted America's current political and economic debate. The book shows how runaway self-reliance not only has unbalanced the economic and political discourse, but also, and more importantly, has hamstrung efforts to develop effective solutions to shared social and economic problems.
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The Global Class War
by Jeff Faux

This provocative new book by EPI founder and former president Jeff Faux explains how globalization is creating a new global political elite—"The Party of Davos"—who have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.
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Bestsellers
 

1. Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation
2. Smart Money
3. Class Size Debate
4. Exceptional Returns
5. Class and Schools
6. Inequality at the Starting Gate
7. The State of Working America 2006/07

EPI Publications Catalog 2007
Want an idea of the breadth of subjects the Institute covers? It's easy with the EPI 2007 publications catalog, available my mail or online as an easy PDF download.