STEM Jobs in West Michigan

This article uses statistics from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) database to discuss the role of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) occupations in the West Michigan economy. The OES is a semi-annual survey of nonfarm establishments in the United States conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The OES database provides local (metropolitan and non-metropolitan localities), state, and national employment and wage estimates for over 800 occupations

Corporate Governance and Corporate Illegality: The effects of board structure on environmental violations

This paper examined the effects of corporate governance structures on the incidence of corporate illegality by analyzing the relationship between environmental violations and several dimensions of corporate board structure. Results demonstrated that the value of stock owned by corporate officers and directors was positively and significantly associated with serious environmental violations. Outsider dominance, joint CEO‐Chairpersons, social responsibility committees, and attorneys on boards were not significantly related to corporate illegal behavior. The control variables of size, industry profitability, firm profitability, and industry concentration were all significantly related to environmental violations. The findings involving board structure cast doubt on the efficacy of many popular corporate governance reform proposals

Proposal for the transmittal of data to LASL and the reporting of TRAC analyses for the multinational reflood experimental program

The proposed form of the digital tape containing the reduced experimental data from any of the 2D/3D facilities (CCTF, SCTF, UPTF, and possibly PKL Core-II) and the procedures which LASL will use in performing TRAC calculations and reporting results are described in this document

Education and the Economy: The Challenge for West Michigan

Recent reports in the popular media raise concerns about a supposed “boy crisis” in the United States with regard to educational attainment. These reports cite evidence that females in the United States have caught up and surpassed males in most measures of schooling. Concern over the gender gap in schooling is misplaced, however, as racial differences in educational attainment are much more severe. This paper presents evidence on educational attainment by race and gender, nationally, within the state, and locally

Employer search and employee quality

Recent research on labor markets has focused on the ability of the firm to influence the productivity of its employees. While most of this research has concentrated on the structure of the compensation package the employer can offer its employees, there has also been interest in the employer's labor market search strategy. Existing studies have attempted to identify the determinants of employer search. This thesis, on the other hand, attempts to measure the effects of employer search on the quality of the firm's employees.Using data from the Employment Opportunities Pilot Project (EOPP), the thesis creates several measures of employer search effort. The search variables are consistent with the notions of extensive and intensive search and formal and informal information networks first suggested by Rees (1966). The thesis first investigates the impact of employer search strategy on employee turnover behavior using Probit regression analysis. The results, while mixed, indicate that employer search has important effects on the employment stability of the firm's employees. Moreover, the results imply that Rees' distinction between formal and informal information networks is relevant and important, both for the determination of the optimal search strategy and for the effects of search strategy on employee turnover.Next, an empirical model of employer search and employee quality is developed. This model is estimated using OLS and Instrumental Variable techniques. Employee quality is measured by standard human capital variables and by subjective employee productivity scores which are found in the EOPP. The results of this procedure are more equivocal. While the distinction between the type of information network used remains important, the effects of employer search effort on employee quality is less clear. Employer search effort is found to be statistically insignificant in many regressions. These results indicate that further theoretical and empirical work on the determinants and effects of employer search is needed.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio

An Alternative Valuation Method for Non-Market Production

Current techniques for valuing non-market production provide biased estimates of the value of human time spent outside the market environment. These biased estimates cause problems for applications which need to quantify the economic contribution of unpaid, non-market, and household labor. For example, the legal system measures economic losses to families and households from the injury or death of a member, while policy decision-makers evaluate the impacts of economic growth on consumer welfare. This bias in valuing non-market effort is particularly troublesome for analyzing consumer spending choices, poverty, and the effects of changing labor force participation rates by sex. We present an alternative valuation method which provides more realistic estimates of the productivity and value of effort performed by non-specialists. We estimate the distribution of market wages as a function of experience. Those distributions are then combined with data from time use surveys to value the output of non-specialist, non-market providers. A discussion of existing techniques is included