The Truckers & Turnover Project is a multi-year study conducted by a team of University of Minnesota Morris faculty and students, as well as faculty at other institutions, in cooperation with several motor carriers. The cooperating firms operate in the "truckload" (TL) segment of the trucking industry. Long haul TL trucking is a high-turnover occupation, and thousands of people train for this job every year, try it out, and leave, while only some new-to-the-industry hires stay on.
Project researchers have worked with data from study firms along with new data collected by the project to identify the factors that predict retention, productivity, crash risk, and other on-the-job outcomes for truckers. An early focus of the Project was the use of behavioral economic field experiments conducted by the researchers at a company training site with trainee truckers who were learning how to handle a big rig for the first time. This enabled empirical work on both business issues and the foundations of economic psychology.
In later work the Project developed the capacity to combine motor carrier operational and human resource data with medical diagnosis and medical insurance claim data on the same drivers. This combination allowed the project's researchers to examine the relationships between medical conditions and individual truck driver outcomes.
More recently, while continuing work related to driver medical conditions, the Project has turned towards aspects of trucking industry economics. Characteristics of the truck driver labor market and the evolution of the truck fleet are being investigated.
Project History
Initial work with the first cooperating firm began in 2002, and the current larger-scale project has been under way since 2005. Using data on truckers (and some data on related control groups) the project has explored several areas of economic psychology such as social preferences, risk aversion, time preferences, and personality. Other topics have included the economic value of employee referrals, truck driver job attachment, and the use of measures from behavioral economic experiments in predicting undergraduate student outcomes in a student control group. The more recent focus on medical conditions has led to an analysis of the relationship between employer-mandated sleep apnea treatment compliance and crash risk among truckers, and related topics. (A full list of papers and other publications.)
Student Work
Involvement by Morris undergraduate research students is critically important to the success of the project. More than 70 students have been trained and meaningfully employed on the main project, and others have worked on smaller research efforts (see the full list). Many of these students have made substantial contributions to publishable work and more than 30 have been listed as co-authors on peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and other scientific publications.