Research - Archive

Learning loss due to school closures and remote learning has cost students months of academic progress, with poorer students faring the worst. The 2022-23 education budget proposes record per-pupil spending, yet we lack meaningful visibility into the quality of outcomes produced for students.

This report examines the compensation of California state correctional officers relative to several other groups. It examines wages in detail because of the richness of available data. It examines benefits in less depth because available data are far less comparable and detailed.

At the request of the Carla and David Crane Foundation, we examined a wide range of potential changes to pension benefit policies for members of the San Jose pension plans. We were asked to examine options that would achieve substantial savings for the city without attempting to evaluate whether they might be subject to successful legal challenge. The policies examined below are not proposals from the authors, but rather options designed to meet these goals. We modeled these changes for the Police and Fire Department Retirement Plan and the Federated City Employees Retirement System.

At the request of the Carla and David Crane Foundation, we examined a wide range of potential changes to CalPERS pension benefit policies for state plan members, without regard to legal or political feasibility. We modeled these changes for plans for state members of PERF A in CalPERS, whose assets account for approximately 52 percent of PERF A assets and 37 percent of CalPERS assets. The estimates we give below are based on this subset of CalPERS. If policies were applied to the entire CalPERS, the impacts on employer contributions would be about 2.7 times as large as described below, assuming the impacts on non-state- member plans are proportional.