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Economics Graduate Student Trevor Nelson Noted for Work on Green Jobs Report

Economics graduate student Trevor Nelson recently helped complete a research project and was acknowledged by Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman for work he did on the “Green Jobs Report.”  Nelson worked on the project along with fellow economics graduate student John Devol, and economics undergraduate major Benjamin Sun, who received his degree in the spring of 2011.

Nelson was working for the Nebraska Department of Labor at the time, although much of his work took place with Dr. Eric Thompson, Director of the UNL College of Business Administration Bureau of Business Research (BBR).

“The project was to identify green projects through the government stimulus program,” Nelson said. “We identified things such as the number of jobs that were created, the number of dollars spent and the number of total dollars that went into the economy. Part of the work with Dr. Thompson was identifying every program we could fit into our definition of green which had been defined by a larger consortium of nine states involved in the project.”

The BBR had been hired by the state of Nebraska to specifically help develop the needed research.

“We were doing input-output matrices for these green projects and running them through a software program to estimate the number of jobs that were created both directly and indirectly through green jobs. I also did a little bit of work on the green job surveys.”

Nelson also helped on two smaller projects that investigated water system improvements in both waste water and drinking water.

"We interviewed a lot of people to define how the water systems and the water industry worked to get a better estimate of output generated by the program."

Nelson did some writing on various aspects of reports and was also responsible for reviewing some of the work by the BBR to ensure that it was all in line with the needs of the Nebraska Department of Labor.

Although Nelson’s job with the Nebraska Department of Labor ended after the summer, Nelson hopes to eventually attain a job in economic research and plans to receive his master’s degree at the end of 2012. Nelson, who originally came to Nebraska from Phoenix, AZ, also received his undergraduate degrees in economics and political science from UNL.
Published: October 14, 2011