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A recent survey conducted by Randstad, a global provider of HR services and the second largest staffing organization in the world, found that 33 percent of American workers feel overqualified for their jobs. Only 3 percent feel under qualified and 65 percent feel they are appropriately qualified.

Data through March 2011, released by Standard & Poor's for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the U.S. National Home Price Index declined by 4.2% in the first quarter of 2011, after having fallen 3.6% in the fourth quarter of 2010. The National Index hit a new recession low with the first quarter's data and posted an annual decline of 5.1% versus the first quarter of 2010. Nationally, home prices are back to their mid-2002 levels.

Small business jobs rose slightly in May as employers added 45,000 jobs to their payrolls. Hours worked and compensation dipped slightly, showing declines of 0.13 percent and 0.14 percent respectively.

America's hiring managers and recruiters are forecasting healthy job growth for the remainder of this year, according to a new survey by Dice Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of specialized career websites for professional communities. Slightly more than half (51%) of employers and recruiters anticipate hiring more professionals in the second half of 2011 than in the previous six months. These survey results suggest the U.S. labor market remains on a favorable trajectory, particularly when the stronger levels of hiring experienced in the first half of the year are taken into account. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private sector employers have added more than 200,000 jobs per month this year.

As the clean energy industry emerges from a challenging period caused by the global economic downturn, it is entering a stage of rapid change in which business models are being transformed against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty. In several key sectors, the market is shifting back toward business structures and technologies that were once abandoned, but are now being revived. A new white paper from Pike Research identifies 10 key trends that are part of this transformation.

The unemployment rate for the foreign born was 9.8 percent in 2010, little changed from a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The jobless rate of the native born was 9.6 percent in 2010, up from 9.2 percent in 2009. The foreign born made up 15.8 percent of the labor force in 2010.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, released data from the comScore MobiLens service which showed that 20 million mobile users across the five leading European markets (UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy), representing 8.5 percent of mobile subscribers in these markets, accessed their bank account via a mobile phone in March 2011. Since August 2010, the first month this activity has been measured in MobiLens, there has been a 15.4 percent rise in mobile bankers which has been largely driven by smartphone users who accounted for 70 percent of the mobile banking market in March 2011. Among Smartphone owners the number of banking users has risen by 40 percent since August 2010.

Banks’ relationships with their customers in the UK and Ireland are under increasing pressure several years after the financial crisis began – with loyalty, satisfaction levels and behavioral patterns posing new challenges, according to Accenture research.

Despite economic pressures on both auto manufacturers and consumers, vehicle ownership satisfaction in the UK has increased from 2010, with improvement occurring across all aspects of the ownership experience, according to the J.D. Power and Associates/What Car? 2011 UK Vehicle Ownership Satisfaction Study (VOSS)(SM).

New research by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis (HCRA) at the School of Public Health estimates that the additional fine particulate matter emissions that can be traced back to traffic congestion in the nation's 83 largest urban areas lead to more than 2,200 premature deaths in the U.S. last year. The related public health cost, researchers say, was, conservatively, at least $18 billion.