The Texas Workforce Commission (“TWC”) recently announced they are no longer going to utilize their TRACER 2 application to provide information regarding the Texas labor market.  For many years, the data scientists at EmployStats and other firms in Texas researched economic indicators such as employment statistics, salary and wages, and job growth using the inquiry capabilities of the TRACER 2 application.

The TWC is the state agency responsible for managing and providing workforce development services to employers and potential employees in Texas.  One of the many service the TWC provides is the access for job seekers and data scientists to reliable labor and employment statistics relevant to occupations and industries within the state of Texas.  Specifically, TWC’s TRACER 2 program provided search functions which allowed individuals to freely tabulate market trends and statistics such as employment/unemployment estimates, industry and occupational projections, and occupational wage data within Texas.

With the TWC’s TRACER 2 application “out to pasture” as the TWC puts it, data can now be accessed using a combination of other TWC databases, as well as United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”) data such as the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (“LAUS”) and the Current Employment Statistics (“CES”).

Conducted every ten years, the Census is the largest survey in the United States. The 2010 Census represented the most massive participation movement ever witnessed in the US, with approximately 74% of households returning their census by mail. The Census Bureau hired about 635,000 employees to walk through neighborhoods throughout the United States to count the remaining households.

The 100% characteristics form was used with every person and housing unit in the United States. It includes information on sex, age, and race by geographic location. Census data is available at many geographic levels, including blocks, zip codes, county, and state.

The 2010 Census asked detailed questions that include information on educational attainment, marital status, labor-force status, and income. The Census is a very large database and hence has many uses ranging from racial profiling in police-stop baselines to wage data.

For more information, please go to www.census.gov/

In the stats world there is somewhat of a debate going on regarding which statistical analyses programs are “better”.  Of course, the answer always depends on what you use it for.  Some like the open-source, developing nature of R.  While others like the established and tried STATA.

In the world of labor and employment economics and in ligation matters that require data analysis of large sets of data, STATA wins hands down.  However, the open source nature of R is appealing in some settings; but the many decades of pre-written (and de bugged) programs make STATA the best choice in most employment and wage and hour cases that require analysis of large data sets.  Performing basic tabulations and data manipulations in R requires many lines of code while STATA often has the command built in.

Here are some interesting snippets from the web on the R v STATA debate:

http://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_difference_between_SPSS_R_and_STATA_software

The main drawback of R is the learning curve: you need a few weeks just to be able to import data and create a simple plot, and you will not cease learning basic operations (e.g. for plotting) for many years. You will stumble upon weirdest problems all the time because you have missed the comma or because your data frame collapses to a vector if only one row is selected.

However, once you mastered this, you will have the full arsenal of modern cutting-edge statistical techniques at your disposal, along with in-depth manuals, references, specialized packages, graphical interface, a helpful community — and all at no cost. Also, you will be able to do stunning graphics.

 

http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/44595-stata-or-r-for-statistics-software/

http://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/r-vs-stata-is-like-a-mercedes-vs-a-bus