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Briefing
Is Urban Cool Cooling New Jersey’s Job Market?
Since 2000, employment in New Jersey has slowed considerably compared with its relatively steady growth in the late 1980s through the 1990s. As of the second quarter of 2015, New Jersey?s total payroll employment was less than 1 percent greater than it was in the first quarter of 2000.
Discussion Paper
How the CHIPS and Science Act Will Target Economic Development in Distressed Labor Markets
As part of this past summer's CHIPS and Science Act, Congress not only funneled $50 billion of federal funding into U.S. semiconductor production, but also allocated $1 billion for a new place-based policy – the Recompete Pilot Program (RPP). The RPP, unrelated to semiconductor production, seeks to boost competitiveness and growth in several of the nation's persistently economically distressed areas. The program intends to target long-term comprehensive economic development and job creation in selected areas by supporting workforce development, business development, and infrastructure ...
Discussion Paper
Parsing the Slow Post-Pandemic Labor Market Recovery of Maryland’s Capital Suburbs
The District of Columbia and its inner ring suburbs — referred to as the Capital Beltway after Interstate 495 — has historically been the core job center for the Washington Metropolitan Area1. (See map below.) Following restrictions to in-person activities at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, unemployment spiked within the Capital Beltway, jobs were shed, and commuting patterns shifted. The labor market recovery from the pandemic shock has been uneven within the Capital Beltway, with stronger growth in the Virginia suburbs than the District of Columbia and Maryland's ...
Discussion Paper
Addressing Baltimore’s Abandoned Housing
Abandoned housing has afflicted many Rust Belt cities since the mid-20th century as their populations declined and housing stocks aged. Many of these cities have attempted policy solutions to address excess abandoned housing due to its association with higher crime, lower nearby property values, and public health issues. In this post, we explore Baltimore's abandoned housing problem and how the city has addressed it with policy as well as a promising proposed strategy by a community organization.
Discussion Paper
Are College Towns Recession Proof?
Research universities bring a variety of benefits to their surrounding communities such as a supply of highly skilled graduates, innovation via research and development activities, and a large stable employer. But do research universities make their communities resilient to economic downturns? In a recent working paper, we attempt to answer this question by examining the unemployment rates for counties containing state flagship universities over the past three national recessions.
Discussion Paper
Urban Marylanders Are Migrating to More Affordable and Smaller Metro Areas
With its unemployment rate reaching 1.9 percent in December 2023, Maryland has the tightest labor market in the country, which poses an ongoing hiring challenge for the state's employers. A key contributor to the tightness is the state's slow post-pandemic labor force recovery, especially in the state's inner-ring suburbs of the District of Columbia. While some of the state's former workers and job seekers have dropped out of the labor force but have remained residents, others have left the state altogether, according to recent statistics that placed Maryland in the top 5 states by net ...
Discussion Paper
Unlocking Housing Supply: What Can We Learn About Recent Construction and Permitting Patterns in Our Region?
Since 2020, housing has become increasingly unaffordable for many families throughout the United States. Nationally, home prices have risen more than 40 percent, on average, and rent has increased by around 22 percent. While heightened demand likely fueled the rapid buildup in home prices since the COVID-19 pandemic, a chronic undersupply of housing from underbuilding in the 2010s also contributes to current housing affordability challenges.Recent rates of new residential construction have varied considerably across communities due in part to differences in the availability and cost of ...
Working Paper
Do Research Universities Recession Proof Their Regions? Evidence from State Flagship College Towns
Using synthetic differences-in-differences models, we study whether U.S. counties containing state flagship universities experienced resiliency via lower unemployment rates during the past three U.S. recessions. We find an insignificant effect for the 2001 recession and a large resiliency effect for the 2008-2009 recession. However, counties with flagship universities faced higher unemployment rates during the 2020 recession, and were therefore less resilient to the Covid-19 recession than other counties. These results support the hypothesis that stable consumption demand for non-tradables ...
Discussion Paper
Who Is Supplying the Labor for Recent Employment Growth in the Rural Fifth District?
Although many rural counties in the Fifth District have experienced population growth since 2020, total population has shrunk in rural areas. Rural regions in the United States have long experienced demographic squeezes as older people tend to stay in place and younger people migrate to metropolitan areas. But has the rural labor supply fared better since the COVID-19 pandemic? This post explores how changes in total population, out-of-the-labor-force population, and unemployment explain employment growth across the Fifth District's rural counties. In aggregate, rural counties have ...
Discussion Paper
The Role of Manufacturing in the Rural Fifth District
A manufacturing job became the pathway to a middle-class lifestyle for many American families in the decades immediately following World War II. Although the industry has suffered large employment losses since the 1970s, it remains a critical source of employment in rural America.This article explores historical trends in manufacturing employment in the United States and the Fifth District. Since the 1990s, despite a sharper decline in manufacturing employment in the district than in the United States, manufacturing in rural North Carolina, rural South Carolina, and rural Virginia composes a ...