workforce

The paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco addresses outsourcing, and discusses free trade, globalization and policies to help U.S. workers.

The U.S. General Accounting Office study indicates that 23 states reported using employer tax revenues in 2002 to fund their own employment placement and training programs. States invested in a variety of industries, although manufacturing was targeted most frequently.

The report sets forth to better understand the overall efficacy of workforce-aid contingent programs, which assist individuals with education expenses in exchange for work in specified fields or locations. The study demonstrates that few states have examined the effectiveness of these programs.

The National Science Board’s report indicates that as the economies flourish in nations that traditionally have exported many of their brightest minds to the U.S. for schooling and careers, and as American corporate outsourcing expands into research and development activities, the prospect of foreign science and engineering graduates coming to school here or remaining after graduation diminishes.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Centers plan to grow North Carolinas biotech industry to 48,000 jobs by 2013 and 125,000 by 2023. Within the report, 54 action steps are discussed that span a variety of objectives.

The report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzes the restructuring of the manufacturing workforce over the past two decades by investigating how the occupational distribution of workers has changed. The analysis reveals that the decline in manufacturing jobs since the 1980s has been accompanied by a shift in the remaining workforce composition toward high-skilled occupations.

The 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.

This paper establishes the existence of a previously overlooked relationship between agglomeration and hours worked. Among non-professionals, hours worked decrease with the density of workers in the same occupation. Among professionals, a positive relationship is found.

The authors estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. They propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the variables to remove the spatial correlation, and application of standard GMM estimators for dynamic panels in a second step. Results show that ignorance of the spatial correlation leads to potentially misleading results.

A survey of 100 businesses in the manufacturing and services sectors in two areas of Greece is used to test empirically the effects of the spatial features of the business-network relationship on firm performance.