Deborah Foster, Ph.D. authored the article "Four Steps to Defend Against Wage and Hour Lawsuits" regarding proactive measures HR managers can take to defend against wage and hour lawsuits, which ran on SHRM.org on March 10, 2011.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recently challenged the use of credit checks as a hiring criterion at several different employers.  Employers that use credit checks in their hiring decisions should limit the positions for which these checks are used.  If credit checks are to be considered employers should first verify that poor credit histories are valid predictors of poor job performance. (download)

In her article, "Employment Practice Audits: The Seven Most Common and Often Costly Mistakes," published by Workforce Management online in January 2011, Welch Senior Economist Amy Aukstikalnis discusses key pitfalls to avoid when conducting audits as well as how proactive HR managers can use employment practice audits as a risk management tool.

More than thirty years ago Finis Welch was the first labor economist to study the impact of the demographic shift caused by the baby boom cohort on the relative earnings of workers.

Since then a number of economists and social scientists have studied the impact of the baby boom generation on a variety of economic, political and social outcomes.  Today the aging of baby boomers has important consequences for the projected growth in government entitlement spending and a host of other economic issues.

Assessments of economic loss due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster must account for the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the unique structure of the commercial fishing industry

As of July 14th 2010, approximately 110,000 claims for damages due to the Deepwater Horizon disaster have been filed with BP. BP has paid out $183 million to these claimants.¹ Claimants include individuals and businesses that have experienced loss of profits and earnings capacity, and government entities that have experienced lost revenue and increased costs of service provision. In addition to these claims, a large number of lawsuits—including many class action lawsuits—have been filed against BP, Transocean, and other allegedly responsible parties. The resolution of these claims and lawsuits will hinge on the determination of economic damages. In these and similar cases, reliable calculations depend critically on the ability to accurately measure many contributing factors, and on assumptions about what would have happened had the disaster not occurred.