WILLINGNESS TO PARTICIPATE AND BIDS IN A FISHING VESSEL BUYOUT PROGRAM: A CASE STUDY OF NEW ENGLAND GROUNDFISH

An experimental fishing vessel buyout program was initiated in 1995 to remove vessels from the Northeast United States groundfish fishery. Information provided by the applicants to this program was used to evaluate the likely participation and potential cost of an expanded buyout initiative. This paper describes the pilot buyout program and the econometric procedures used to forecast participation and bids at various levels of program spending. Program participation and bid levels were modeled in two stages using participation and bid functions. The expanded buyout program, completed in April 1998, provided a unique opportunity to evaluate initial participation and cost forecasts. Methods used in this study are also applicable to modeling other fishery related economic decisions, such as the trading of individual transferable quota shares.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Earnings on the information technology roller coaster: insight from matched employer-employee data

This paper uses matched employer-employee data for the state of Georgia to examine workers’ earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector’s employment boom of the mid-1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for individual characteristics before the sector’s boom, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than those who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having worked in tech, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.

The ups and downs of jobs in Georgia: what can we learn about employment dynamics from state administrative data?

This paper demonstrates how state administrative data (from Georgia) can be used to decompose net employment growth in order to track establishment births, deaths, contractions, and expansions over time. Even though net employment growth can look quite similar across industries, the composition of that employment change can look quite different. The panel nature of the data allow the authors to see that overall lack of expansion and continued contraction among large establishments were the driving forces behind the weak employment growth immediately following the 2001 recession.

The push-pull effects of the information technology boom and bust: insight from matched employer-employee data

This paper examines the inflow and outflow of workers to different industries in Georgia during the information technology (IT) boom of the 1990s and the subsequent bust. Workers in the software and computer services industry were much more likely to have been absent from the Georgia workforce prior to the boom but were no more likely than workers from other industries to have exited the workforce during the bust. Consequently, the Georgia workforce likely experienced a net gain in worker human capital as a result of being an area of concentration of IT-producing activity during the IT boom.

High-K materials and metal gates for CMOS applications

The scaling of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors has led to the silicon dioxide layer used as a gate dielectric becoming so thin that the gate leakage current becomes too large. This led to the replacement of SiO2 by a physically thicker layer of a higher dielectric constant or ‘high-K’ oxide such as hafnium oxide. Intensive research was carried out to develop these oxides into high quality electronic materials. In addition, the incorporation of Ge in the CMOS transistor structure has been employed to enable higher carrier mobility and performance. This review covers both scientific and technological issues related to the high-K gate stack – the choice of oxides, their deposition, their structural and metallurgical behaviour, atomic diffusion, interface structure, their electronic structure, band offsets, electronic defects, charge trapping and conduction mechanisms, reliability, mobility degradation and oxygen scavenging to achieve the thinnest oxide thicknesses. The high K oxides were implemented in conjunction with a replacement of polycrystalline Si gate electrodes with metal gates. The strong metallurgical interactions between the gate electrodes and the HfO2 which resulted an unstable gate threshold voltage resulted in the use of the lower temperature ‘gate last’ process flow, in addition to the standard ‘gate first’ approach. Work function control by metal gate electrodes and by oxide dipole layers is discussed. The problems associated with high K oxides on Ge channels are also discussed.RMW acknowledges an IBM Faculty award and JR acknowledges funding from EPSRC.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mser.2014.11.00