Educating Providers on the Value of Community Health Outreach Workers in the New Mainer Population

Lewiston, Maine has seen a recent surge of asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants, mainly from African Countries, termed New Mainers. Community health outreach workers (CHOWs) are front line public health workers who are trusted members of the community being served, which enables them to serve as a liaison between providers and their patients. Educating providers on the role of CHOWs may increase their utilization in the clinical setting and improve the quality of care for the New Mainer population in Lewiston.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1291/thumbnail.jp

Administrative Transaction Data

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.transactions data; administrative data; cybertechnology; privacy and confidentiality; virtual organizations

Using Cyber-enabled Transaction Data to Study Productivity and Innovation in Organizations

This paper draws on recent research in a wide variety of disciplines to identify the key elements necessary to build an empirical infrastructure that will advance research on one of the key building blocks of science and innovation policy: organizations. We argue that cyber-tools and new data will permit researchers to examine the innovation process |both successes and failures| and explore business performance and business dynamics at the level of the appropriate economic entity. We develop a roadmap that outlines how the new data can be developed, from harvesting the web to direct observation from deep within companies. The paper identifies a set of research questions and an approach whose pursuit could be used to develop a national research data infrastructure for the study of innovation and organizational performance. One key element of the approach is to identify and study innovation processes within organizations by collecting data on inputs and outcomes of innovation projects (or initiatives) within organizations. Another is the collection of representative data by business function/processes across firms, a proven statistical and economic approach (Sturgeon et al. 2006, Brown 2008, Lewin et al 2008). Finally, we argue that the work to develop new data from deep within firms should involve the participation of computer and information scientists. Opportunities for quasi experimental approaches to data collection, and noninvasive techniques to harvest data from within firms (i.e., auto-populating of researcher databases) need to be explored. More generally, the bringing together of scientists to consider business microdata privacy/access and data collection from organizations is itself significant, with potential for creating opportunities in a broad range of applications.

Balancing Access to Data And Privacy. A review of the issues and approaches for the future

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.Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, Organizing Microeconomic Data

Wages, Productivity, and the Dynamic Interaction of Businesses and Workers

This paper exploits a new matched universal and longitudinal employer-employee database at the US Census Bureau to empirically investigate the link between firms' choice of worker mix and the implied relationships between productivity and wages. We particularly focus on the decision making process of new firms and examine the role of both learning and selection. Our key empirical results are: (i) We find substantial and persistent differences in earnings per worker, output per worker, and worker mix across businesses within narrowly defined industries, which remain even after controlling for other observable characteristics. (ii) We find that new businesses exhibit even greater heterogeneity in earnings and productivity than do mature businesses, but that they adjust to the mature business pattern as they age. The adjustment process, while different for earnings and productivity, is consistent both with firms learning as they age and with the exit of mistake' prone firms. (iii) The dynamics of the reduction in productivity heterogeneity of new firms as they age is both complex and very different from the dynamic reduction of earnings heterogeneity.

Jobs, Workers and Changes in Earnings Dispersion

The 'fractal' nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role of labour reallocation. Once we drop the assumption that all firms pay a given worker the same, the allocation of workers to firms matters for the dispersion of earnings. This perspective highlights two new factors that can affect the dispersion of earnings: rates of job and worker reallocation, and the nature of the process allocating workers to jobs. We set out a framework capturing this idea and quantify the impact of reallocation on earnings dispersion, using a dataset that comprises almost the universe of workers and the universe of employers in Maryland. We show that these factors have potentially large effects in general on earnings dispersion. In the case of Maryland over the period 1985-1994, the changing allocation of workers to jobs played a significant role in explaining movements in the dispersion of earnings.Earnings inequality, labour reallocation, matched worker and firm panels

Do as the Neighbors Do: The Impact of Social Networks on Immigrant Employees

Substantial immigrant segregation in the United States, combined with the increase in the share of the U.S. foreign-born population, have led to great interest in the causes and consequences of immigrant concentration, including those related to the functioning of labor markets. This paper provides robust evidence that both the size and the quality of an immigrant enclave affects the labor market outcomes of new immigrants. We develop new measures of the quality, or information value, of immigrant networks by exploiting data based on worker earnings records matched to firm and Census information. We demonstrate the importance of immigrant employment links: network members are much more likely than other immigrants to be employed in the same firm as their geographic neighbors. Immigrants living with large numbers of employed neighbors are more likely to have jobs than immigrants in areas with fewer employed neighbors. The effects are quantitatively important and robust under alternative specifications. For example, in a high value network – one with an average employment rate in the 90th percentile – a one standard deviation increase in the log of the number of contacts in the network is associated with almost a 5% increase in the employment rate. Earnings, conditional on employment, increase by about 0.7%.Social networks, immigrant enclaves, labor market intermediaries