COVID hit North Carolina hard, with 3.1 million cases so far and over 26,000 deaths. Low-income communities in North Carolina were especially hard hit, with higher rates of COVID infections and deaths, sudden loss of jobs with little buffer, disruption of families and communities. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative assessment of COVID-19’s impact on low-income North Carolinians and specifically on a subset of lower income North Carolina counties that are served by the North Carolina Community Action Association (NCCAA).
assistance in the immediate aftermath of this extreme weather event, we document the role net migration played in recent population growth—a crucial issue in climate change policy deliberations—and outline creative strategies and investments Florida officials will have to leverage to both rebuild and create resilient communities with reputational equity that remain attractive to newcomers as well as long term residents moving forward.
Hurricane Ian destroyed property and disrupted livelihoods in some of Florida’s largest and most rapidly growing coastal and inland counties.
As major health systems continue to merge, one of the main questions for commentators and researchers concerns the somewhat vague idea of community benefit. The Atrium Health–Advocate merger is set to provide approximately $5 billion in annual community benefit, targeted to aid vulnerable communities and individuals. Community benefit can be understood as any action, investment or program provided by a tax-exempt hospital or health system that promotes the health and wellness of the community they serve. In addition to community benefit, Advocate Health described a $2 billion pledge to disrupt the root causes of health inequities across the rural and urban communities it serves.
A daunting tangle of problems defines the global energy space as 2022 winds down. On the one hand, the war in the Ukraine combined with curtailed Russian oil/gas supplies into Europe has reminded many that unfriendly energy suppliers can also deliver inflation and hardship to their customers. On another side, efforts to increase oil/gas supplies both in Europe and globally, face stout resistance to anything that might further entrench hydrocarbons into national economies. Inflation is prompting monetary policies to tighten even as fiscal indiscipline continues via historically high government deficit spending. Concerns over climate change remain an article of faith among leaders of many countries. Other voices decry the folly of calls to suppress oil/gas production when greener alternatives are not ready to replace them. Electorates seem both confused and restless. The risk that they vote in leaders less insistent on decarbonizing economies is palpable.
This paper examines how US immigration-induced labor mobility frictions affect entrepreneurship and firm monopsony. I exploit a natural experiment in the US immigration system that unexpectedly increased Green Card (GC) related job-switching frictions for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I confirm that this shock reduced inter-firm employee mobility for Indian and Chinese employees.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, two large infrastructure-related bills have been enacted. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in November 2021, provides funding for a wide range of activities including roads, rail, transit, broadband, water and electrical infrastructure.
Long depicted as a global melting pot, the United States is home to a collection of sharply divergent geographies, regions and cultures. An overlooked measure of our diversity, however, is economic. While national statistics tell a story of averages, they fail to account for the true drivers of economic expansion and contraction. It is only upon examining America’s microeconomies – our cities, towns, suburbs and rural communities – that we can begin to appreciate the myriad and complex determinants of broader U.S., and sometimes even global, economic trends.
Productivity is the single most important determinant of a society’s standard of living. But how can you gauge it, and why does it matter? In this second report from the American Growth Project, we examine the productivity levels of the 50 largest microeconomies in the United States along with how those productivity levels have shifted during the last 15 years.
To date, our work on the American Growth Project has focused on the United States’ most populous urban areas. Our previous analyses of growth and productivity in the 50 largest Extended Metropolitan Areas (EMAs) have served to illustrate the tremendous amount of economic diversity to be found within the United States, revealing stark variations in economic trends, major industries and migration patterns in the country’s largest cities. We turn now to the task of measuring and analyzing economic activity in the next largest set of EMAs: the top 100 midsize cities.
As we move into 2023, the state of the economy remains highly uncertain following a volatile year that included both strong job growth and persistent inflation. Unfortunately, our economic models don’t bear particularly glad tidings for the new year, as we expect the U.S. economy will enter a recession in the second half of 2023 or early 2024. What is more, the economic pain caused by this downturn will be felt unevenly across the country: Our work in the American Growth Project has revealed significant divergence across regional economies in the United States that is too often left out of analysis focusing on national statistics alone.
North Carolina’s phenomenal migration-driven population growth masks a troubling trend: high rates of death and dying prematurely which, left unchecked, can potentially derail the state’s economic growth and prosperity in the years ahead. On average, 246 North Carolinians died each day during the 2010s, increasing to 317 daily between April 1, 2020 and July 1, 2022. COVID-19 and the substance abuse crisis have played a major role in premature deaths of prime working age citizens of the state. Both people-based and place-based strategies and interventions are urgently needed to address the state’s death crisis.
We reassess whether and to what degree the hiring, development, and promotion decisions of S&P 500 companies has led to misrepresentation of and bias against their minority executives. Instead of the US population benchmark that has conventionally been used to measure misrepresentation, and from such misrepresentation attribute the presence and magnitude of racial bias and discrimination, we measure misrepresentation in US executives using the benchmark of the racial/ethnic densities (RAEDs) of their college cohort peers. Our key result is that the differences between US executive RAEDs and the RAEDs of their college peers are far smaller than those found using the US population, typically by an order of magnitude or more.
We describe an experimental curriculum innovation that creates a safe space for students to engage in courageous conversations—to openly share diverse thoughts and opinions as well as vigorously debate politically charged issues of critical business importance.
This paper explores the ups and downs of innovation and productivity growth in the US economy and potential connections to the ups and downs of business dynamism and entrepreneurship over the last few decades.
This work examines the effects on worker psychological well-being and productivity of highly publicized negative identity-related societal events, such as the 2020 murder of George Floyd, mass shootings like the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting that targeted LGBTQ+ individuals, and the 2021 Atlanta area Spa shootings that targeted individuals of Asian descent.
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) tools necessitates the development of human skills that allow workers to use these new technologies to create value that AI tools cannot on their own.
Pay transparency policies are increasingly popular among governments in the United States and around the world.
COVID-19 exacerbated existing shortages in the labor market, causing business leaders to revise corporate strategies designed to recruit and retain the workforce needed to compete in at the state, national, and global level. We must recognize and support the critical role our community colleges serve in meeting employers’ post-pandemic workforce demands if we are to close the skills gap in the current labor market.
Immigration is one of the most contentious policy issues, and Congress has for decades failed to make any significant legislative progress. The result is an incoherent policy landscape and serious operational challenges on the ground. At the same time, immigration and immigrant integration are critical to U.S. workforce growth, government fiscal solvency, and innovation. I discuss key findings from the economics literature and their implications for where to focus immigration reform efforts.