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Update (4/25/08): The York study is being covered again here. This article also mentions that EMSI’s model is being studied by the Learning and Skills Council to potentially become part of the standard evaluation of UK institutions.

Update 2 (4/28): Another article can be found here.

A recent socioeconomic impact (SEIM) report by Economic Modeling Specialists has shown that York College is vital to the regional economy in the counties of York and North Yorkshire, England. The study is one of the first that EMSI has conducted in the United Kingdom since the adaptation of its highly successful North American impact model that has been applied to over 500 community and technical colleges on this side of the Atlantic.

An excerpt from the article in the York Press:

It is estimated that the present -day York and North Yorkshire workforce embodies approximately 58,600 qualifications gained by past and present York College learners.

These added skills promote business productivity and increase regional income. The report adds that once current learners become active in the workforce they contribute millions to the local economy by promoting business output, raising consumer spending and increase property income in the UK.

Principal Alison Birkinshaw said: “This report confirms how important York College is to both the local and regional economy and how successful the college is in addressing the needs of local and regional businesses. Learners enjoy higher earnings after receiving education from York College, thereby expanding the economic base and reducing the burden on taxpayers.”

Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI) is pleased to announce a new partnership with global publishing company John Wiley & Sons to support Wiley Pathways, a new line of texts from the Wiley Higher Education division. The partnership will allow both companies to better serve community, technical, and career colleges and their students with high-quality, flexible curricula aligned to high-demand jobs.

“This is a great example of how EMSI’s integrated data can help both public- and private-sector organizations make informed, strategic decisions,” says EMSI CEO Andrew Crapuchettes. “We’re very pleased to be working with the Wiley Pathways team, and we believe our partnership will bring great value to their customers and ours.”

Under the agreement, EMSI will produce co-branded regional reports focusing on the labor market demand for occupations linked to Wiley Pathways curricula, which cover four major fields: Business, Emergency Management, Health Care Management, and Information Technology. The reports will inform colleges about opportunities for developing, expanding, or supporting related programs. Students will benefit by getting a detailed picture of the local, state, and national job market for the knowledge and skills they can acquire in those programs.

With all the headlines talking about a recession linked to the subprime crisis, we thought it would be interesting to take a look at where all those high-risk mortgages are. By combining data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), let’s look at where in the U.S. the most 2006 loans were originated through lenders who specialize in subprime loans.

In the following map, which uses 2006 mortgage data for home purchases (i.e., excluding improvement or refinance), each dot represents at most 372 loans and the dot density provides a good visualization of the counties where subprime loans are most concentrated. Note that the data set does not specifically mark loans as subprime, so as a proxy we count loans provided by certain institutions which HUD has identified as subprime lenders.

The major problem areas are in southern California, Florida, Phoenix Arizona, Dallas and Houston in Texas, and Chicago. Here is a list of the 15 counties with the highest numbers of these loans (8 of which are in California or Florida):

However, totals can be deceiving—what about subprime lenders’ loans as a percentage of all home purchase loans originated in the county? The following list shows just that for the top 15 “worst” subprime counties (only counties with 250 or more total home purchase loans in 2006 are included):

Again, California and Florida counties make up 10 of the 15 listed. For comparison, the national average percentage of subprime home purchase loans was 12.6%.

Finally, let’s go beyond just purchase loans and include loans for refinance and improvement as well. After all, purchase loans accounted for less than half of all subprime loans in 2006 (see graphic).

Here, then, are the counties with the highest percentage of all types of loans from subprime lenders (counties with fewer than 500 total loans excluded):

The list isn’t quite the same, is it? For comparison, the U.S. average rate for subprime loans of all types was 14.1% in 2006.

A free information seminar is being co-hosted by EMSI and Warwickshire College on 23 April in at Warwickshire College’s Henley-in-Arden Centre. The seminar, intended for FE college principals or their representatives, will provide an overview of the Socioeconomic Impact (SEIM) Study, including the underlying approach, types of information and analysis included, its benefits for colleges, its relationship to the Foster Report, and the kinds of data that college must furnish to EMSI in order to complete the study. In addition, EMSI will provide a prototype demonstration of its labour market analysis tools for FE colleges. A complimentary lunch will be served.

Please fill out the form on this page to reserve your place and receive more information.

The introductory pricing period for EMSI’s Socioeconomic Impact (SEIM) study is approaching its end. The special pricing of £7500 has been available since autumn 2007 following the successful pilot study conducted by Warwickshire College. In the meantime, some 40 FE colleges in the UK have taken advantage of this introductory rate to commission SEIM studies of their own.

Any FE college that signs a contract for the SEIM before 31 May 2008 will receive the lower rate, but after that date the price will increase to the standard rate of £8500.

For more information about SEIM pricing, please contact EMSI.

Everyone knows that manufacturing is on the decline both nationwide and in states like Ohio, right? Well, not exactly—the story is actually much more complicated.

It is true that Ohio’s manufacturing sector saw a loss of some 93,000 jobs (about 10 percent) from 2002 to 2007, even as other portions of the economy were pulling out of the 2001 recession. Nationally, the manufacturing sector lost more than a million jobs, or 7 percent, over the same period. However, this does not at all mean that manufacturing should be neglected by economic development efforts. Rather, the sector is now undergoing intense restructuring that will require innovative, targeted investments. In particular, Ohio economic development professionals should be aware of four major trends in the state’s manufacturing sector:

1. The sector is actually adding new jobs in many non-urban areas.
2. The sector is becoming smaller, more productive, and higher-paying.
3. An aging workforce and rapid skill changes will tighten the sector’s job market.
4. The weak dollar will benefit manufacturers who can export products.

Read on to examine each of these trends in more detail: Recent Trends in Ohio Manufacturing (PDF)

The Kauffman Foundation has released a new report on increasing entrepreneurship in the US economy. The report’s foundational assumption is that entrepreneurs have created most of the new technologies and business models that have fueled our nation’s staggering productivity growth in the past few decades.

The central policy recommendations of the report are

1. “Ensuring a skilled workforce” by improving K-16 education and beyond in math, science, and entrepreneurial thinking, as well as making it easier for skilled and educated immigrants to work in the US.
2. “Reforming health care” to reduce costs and risks for the self-employed and small businesses.
3. “Promoting innovation” by reforming the patent system, increasing commercialization of university research, and monitoring foreign R&D activity for new ideas.
4. “Limiting overly burdensome regulation and liability litigation,” which have a greater effect on entrepreneurial firms than on large established corporations.

Read the full report here.

Update 2 (5/1/2008): EMSI has released the revised dataset, now incorporating state projections from New York (the last state to provide them).

Update (4/16/2008): We have temporarily reverted to the previous version of our data pending a review, testing, and revision of the new industry/occupation projections. The new data, with revised projections, will be re-released on Thursday, May 1, 2008. We apologize for any inconvenience to our users.

Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI) is pleased to announce the release of its spring 2008 data set. All of our industry, occupation, demographic, indicator, and regional input-output modeling data have been rebuilt using our most sophisticated integration process ever and the latest available data from our 80-plus government sources. This update affects past, current, and projected data, so numbers will differ slightly from those contained in past EMSI data releases.

Here is an overview of the additions and changes in the new data (note that a few elements are still being added but will be available by the end of the week):

New County-Level Indicators

In this data release, we have continued to expand our portfolio of county-level economic indicators. We’ve added:

• Mortgage data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), including number of loans and total loan amounts from regular and subprime lenders (identified by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development).
• (Coming soon) Overall workforce indicators from the Census LEHD data set, including job churn (turnover) and percentage of workforce by age group and gender.
• Social Security beneficiaries and benefit amounts, both total and for retirees only.
• Building permits issued by year for both single- and multi-family units.
• Annual and monthly overall unemployment rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - monthly figures coming soon.
• Estimates of total persons in poverty by county, children in poverty, and median household income, all from the Census’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program.
• (Coming soon) Personal income information from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), including dividend/interest/rent income, transfer payments (Social Security, welfare payments, veterans’ benefits, government grants and loans, unemployment benefits, etc), and overall per-capita personal income.

Methodology Updates for Published Industry/Occupation Data

• We use the latest data sources, especially 1st and 2nd quarter 2007 covered employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
• The Economic Impact input-output model uses updated national 2002 benchmark and 2006 annual tables from the BEA, inclusion of Census of Governments data, and an improved regionalization methodology for a more updated and accurate model.
• More sophisticated combination of covered employment (BLS) and complete employment (BEA), to account for BEA’s occasional re-classifications of jobs from one industry or county to another. This results in a more accurate count of proprietors and non-covered wage and salary jobs in cases where the BEA’s “complete” employment numbers are actually lower than the BLS’s covered employment numbers. This creates better local data, although it means that our state and national totals are no longer strictly benchmarked to BEA totals.

Improved, More Localized Projections

In the past, we controlled our own local projections first to statewide and then to national projections. We have since found that this sometimes places too much weight on national trends, which could override local trends. We now put more weight on our own local projections, official sub-state area projections (where available), and official statewide projections. (We still use national projections to adjust our own local projections initially, mainly because national projections are the most up-to-date and have the most industry-by-industry detail.) Overall, this results in more localized industry/occupation projections.

Finally, we have made minor adjustments to our demographics projection methodology to improve projections in certain counties where different racial/ethnic populations have rapidly divergent growth rates compared to statewide trends.

Workforce3one has an informative collection of documents that summarize the lessons of Workforce Innovation Networks (WINs) — an initiative to build capacity of employer organizations (such as chambers) to serve as market-driven workforce intermediaries. Documents include:

• Organizing and Supporting the Employer Role in Workforce Development: A Guide for Employer Organizations
• Creating Community Advancement Initiatives: A “How To” Manual
• Building Employer-Responsive Workforce Systems at the State Level: A “How To” Manual
• Providing Business Services: A “How To” Manual
• Partnering with One-Stop Career Centers-Strategies for Recruiting and Training Employees

Download the PDFs from Workforce3one’s page (free reg. req’d), or at Jobs for the Future.

EMSI’s data, modeling, and consulting services played a key role in a report released today by Bruce Corrie, professor of economics and director of the Strategic Business Design Institute at Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The report, titled “Ethnic Capital and Minnesota’s Future: Mexican Americans in Minnesota,”  examines the consumer spending power, entrepreneurial capital, productive capital, cultural capital, and other ways that Mexican-Americans benefit the Minnesota economy. The report finds that Mexican-Americans have consumer power of $1 billion, pay $283 million in personal taxes, and have large impacts on the state’s industries and labor market.