ESTIMATING THE GEOGRAPHIC EXTENT OF PART-TIME LABOR-MARKETS - UNITED-STATES-ARMY RESERVES

Local labor market supportability is becoming an increasingly importan t issue for the United States Army Reserves. As military bases close a nd Reserve units are consolidated at fewer Reserve centers, the approp riate reassignments of units to Reserve centers require accurate measu res of the ability of local labor markets to support such consolidatio ns. A two-stage random effect model is applied to evaluate the geograp hical extent of the labor market for Army Reserve centers. In the firs t stage model, a lognormal distribution is used to describe the commut ing distance behavior of the Reserve center members. In the second sta ge model, we estimate the mean of log transformed commute distance as a function of regional characteristics of the Reserve center. An itera tive weighted stepwise selection method is used to find a set of chara cteristics that adequately predict variation of the mean commute dista nce over Reserve centers. The resulting model is used as inputs to loc ation and market assessment models to assist the marketing decisions o f the Army Recruiting Command.