Truckers & Turnover Project

Project summary:

The Truckers & Turnover Project is a multi-year study in the field of "behavioral personnel economics" conducted by a team of University of Minnesota, Morris faculty and students, and faculty at other institutions, in cooperation with a large motor carrier. The cooperating firm operates 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 relatively few stay on. Project researchers have worked with the cooperating trucking company using its internal data along with new data collected by the project to identify the factors that predict productivity, retention, accident risk, and other on-the-job outcomes for truckers. The project used 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 to measure driver characteristics. The newest extension of the project is to the analysis of the effects of the cooperating firm's large scale pilot effort in screening, diagnosing, and treating its drivers for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).