Government agencies are awash in data, but do not often use it effectively to evaluate and improve public services. A new center at the University of California will be devoted to harnessing the potential of the vast data being collected through the routine provision of services by California government agencies. The California Policy Lab will curate administrative data from across California’s government to produce cutting-edge policy research on key issues from education and criminal justice, to social services and labor.
Governor Jerry Brown’s signing last week of two landmark climate bills, SB 32 and AB 197, demonstrates the emergence of a powerful coalition of environmentalists, labor unions and grassroots “environmental justice” organizations that will be crucial to achieving the new emissions goals, as explained in a new report by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California.
Expanding Head Start is good public policy and will pay for itself, according to new research by faculty in the University of California, Berkeley’s economics department and Goldman School of Public Policy.
Many cities and some states are enacting or considering $15 minimum wages. Meanwhile, economists’ debates about their impact have been heating up. Landmark research conducted at UC Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED) had greatly reduced concerns that past minimum wage increases had negative employment effects. But some economists still claim that substantial job losses will occur among low-skilled workers, such as teens.
California’s leadership on climate policy solutions has brought much attention to the quantity of jobs created in the state’s renewable energy industry. Yet the quality of those jobs has largely remained a mystery, and clean energy jobs aren’t automatically good jobs. A new UC Berkeley report released this morning at a press conference at the IBEW-NECA Sacramento Area Electrical Training Center finds that California’s principal climate policy, the Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), has created good jobs with a career path for non-college bound workers.
As we approach the seventh official year of recovery, several sectors of California’s labor market still have not regained the jobs lost during the Great Recession according to research by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley.
Just over a third of non-supervisory manufacturing production workers in the United States and half of the nation’s manufacturing workers hired through temporary agencies rely on at least one public assistance program to support themselves or their families, according to research by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.