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"The value of administrative transaction data, such as financial transactions, credit card purchases, telephone calls, and retail store scanning data, to study social behaviour has long been recognised. Now new types of transactions data made possible by advances in cyber-technology have the potential to further exland social scientists' research frontier. This chapter discusses the potential for such data to be included in the scientific infrastructure. It discusses new approaches to data dissemination, as well as the privacy and confidentiality issues raised by such data collection. It also discusses the characteristics of an optimal infrastructure to support the scientific analysis of transactions data." [author's abstract]

AbstractThis paper provides new evidence to inform the policy debate about the effect of a newly important industry—the temporary help industry—on
the labor market outcomes of low‐income workers and those workers who are at risk of being on public assistance. The core issue of whether
temporary help work harms the long‐term prospects of disadvantaged individuals depends critically on the alternatives available to the worker.
Temporary employment results in labor market outcomes that are better than not working at all. For example, while nonemployed public assistance
recipients have only a 35 percent chance of being employed a year later, those who were in temporary employment have almost twice the likelihood of being
employed in the same period. These findings, if correct, would support the use of temporary agencies by welfare programs. © 2003 by the Association
for Public Policy Analysis and Management

"Access to sensitive micro data should be provided using remote access data enclaves. These enclaves should be built to facilitate the productive, high-quality usage of microdata. In other words, they should support a collaborative environment that facilitates the development and exchange of knowledge about data among data producers and consumers. The experience of the physical and life sciences has shown that it is possible to develop a research community and a knowledge infrastructure around both research questions and the different types of data necessary to answer policy questions. In sum, establishing a virtual organization approach would provided the research community with the ability to move away from individual, or artisan, science, towards the more generally accepted community based approach. Enclave should include a number of features: metadata documentation capacity so that knowledge about data can be shared; capacity to add data so that the data infrastructure can be augmented; communication capacity, such as wikis, blogs and discussion groups so that knowledge about the data can be deepened and incentives for information sharing so that a community of practice can be built. The opportunity to transform micro-data based research through such a organizational infrastructure could potentially be as far-reaching as the changes that have taken place in the biological and astronomical sciences. It is, however, an open research question how such an organization should be established: whether the approach should be centralized or decentralized. Similarly, it is an open research question as to the appropriate metrics of success, and the best incentives to put in place to achieve success." (author's abstract)