em<strong>The Economics of Social Insurance and Employee Benefits</strong>em focuses on nonwage benefits paid to workers in the United States covering both gove... » 

emThe Economics of Social Insurance and Employee Benefitsem focuses on nonwage benefits paid to workers in the United States covering both governmentmandated and voluntarily provided benefits. The author argues that benefitsaffect workplace productivity and concentrates on the economic thinking behindhow to design nonwage benefits in order to achieve competitive advantage. brPart I briefly introduces these programs and discusses some of the insuranceand economic concepts that are useful both for evaluating current programs andin analyzing what changes might mean for future costs and benefits. Part IIdeals with mandated social insurance programs while Part III discussesbenefits voluntarily provided by employers. Throughout the book private sectorhuman resource practices and public sector human resource policies are linkedto various benefit models the human capital model the passive participantmodel the insurance model the managed care model and the integrated healthbenefits model. Butler argues that the current programcentered approach tohuman resource and risk management is often ineffectual because it 1 ignoresoverlapping benefits that mitigate useful costsharing mechanisms 2 oftenresults in the concentration of benefits among relatively few workers and 3sometimes has the unintended consequences of negatively affecting workershuman capital. In advocating a workerspecific approach to employee benefitsthe book offers a unique perspective on how human resource managers riskmanagers and public policy makers can promote those institutions and programsthat best increase workers productivity. «