Reports & Papers

The government is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers, especially in information technology and cyber security jobs. The conventional wisdom in branches of policy and public administration is that the shortage is driven by low salaries that are not competitive for attracting top talent. Using longitudinal data on high skilled workers between 1993 and 2013, this paper shows that, if anything, government employees earn more than their private sector counterparts. Although government workers tend to earn less in the raw data, these differences are driven by the correlation between unobserved ability and selection into private sector jobs. These results are robust to additional data from the Census Bureau between 2005 and 2016. Instead, this paper shows that a more plausible culprit behind the worker shortage in government is a lack of development opportunities and poor management.

"Building on CRI 1.0, Cyber Readiness Index 2.0 examines one hundred twenty-five countries that have embraced, or are starting to embrace, ICT and the Internet and then applies an objective methodology to evaluate each country's maturity and commitment to cyber security across seven essential elements."

The Cyber Readiness Index (CRI) examines thirty-five countries that have embraced ICT and the Internet and compares their maturity and commitment to protecting those investments using an initial objective assessment of where countries stand in cyber security in five areas.

The following report presents a consensus view of the members of a bipartisan study group on the U.S.-Japan alliance. The report specifically addresses energy, economics and global trade, relations with neighbors, and security-related issues. Within these areas, the study group offers policy recommendations for Japan and the United States, which span near- and long-term time frames. These recommendations are intended to bolster the alliance as a force for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

In today's interconnected world, the Internet is no longer a tool. Rather, it is a service that helps generate income and employment, provides access to business and information, enables e-learning, and facilitates government activities. It is an essential service that has been integrated into every part of our society. Our experience begins when an Internet Service Provider (ISP) uses fixed telephony (plain old telephone service), mobile-cellular telephony, or fixed fiber-optic or broadband service to connect us to the global network. From that moment on, the ISP shoulders the responsibility for the instantaneous, reliable, and secure movement of our data over the Internet.

This paper explores the vulnerabilities to cyber attacks of infrastructure that today carries nearly all the world's data and voice traffic: undersea communications cables. Long-standing physical vulnerabilities in cable infrastructure have been compounded by new risk found in the network management systems that monitor and control cable operations. Unlike an attack on a water treatment plant's control systems, however, an attack on the cables' control systems could devastate the world's economies — presenting a different kind of Internet "kill switch" altogether — shutting down world commerce, and doing it all with the click of a mouse.