2003-2004 Undergraduate Research Award
Winner
Michael Hammill graduated in December 2003 with a degree in business economics and has chosen to continue his education in the college's MBA program. He is currently a graduate research assistant in the Economic Research Institute of Erie (ERIE). During his undergraduate and graduate careers Mike worked with Dr. James Kurre, associate professor of economics.
Dr. Kurre wrote in his nomination that Mike was consistently outstanding, clearly the best student researcher that he has had, and when Mike hit a snag he found a way around it.
His primary focus was the Erie Productivity project during which he developed a measure for identifying local manufacturing output per hour worked. Dr. Kurre and his colleagues had long speculated that the Erie area lagged the state and nation in productivity. Despite the fact that government officials said we couldn't measure local productivity, Mike found a way to do it. The results of his project became a central part of ERIE's 2003 Annual Conference and led to numerous television interviews and page-one headlines in the local newspaper.
Mike also worked on several smaller projects:
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Evaluating the Bureau of Economics' income data for the local area.
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Finding data on local bank deposits, crime, and information technology.
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Comparing the length, timing, and severity of the business cycle in Erie with the nation.
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Finding arcane bankruptcy and supposedly non-existent unionization data.
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Creating databases for the ERIEdata.org Web site, which includes over 170,000 data points.
Other highlights of his work included receiving a Summer Research Fellowship at the college; serving as an ERIE research assistant for 18 months; receiving the best oral presentation award at the college's undergraduate conference in 2003; presenting a paper at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Salt Lake City in 2003, and providing the background for a paper presented at the Annual Fall Conference of the Association for University Business and Economic Research in 2003.