PERC Blog

Professional and Business Services Lead Employment Gains

Posted: May 18, 2023 by Andrew J. Rettenmaier, Somali Ghosh Sinha
The COVID pandemic sparked massive job market changes - some temporary and some enduring. The move toward remote work took a tremendous leap forward as many of us learned first-hand how to get things done with our coworkers even when not in the office together. Some of the highest employment growth over the last three years has been in occupatio...

Wage Changes Around the Country

Posted: March 31, 2023 by Andrew J. Rettenmaier, Somali Ghosh Sinha
Wages have been rising over the past couple of years but by less than inflation has risen, resulting in declining real wages. From January 2021 through February 2023, prices rose 14.8% and the average wage rose 10.6%. This produced inflation-adjusted wages that were 96.3% of their January 2021 level as of February.<img alt="Slide...

Inflation-Adjusted GDP Growth Across the Country

Posted: January 31, 2023 by Dennis W. Jansen, Andrew J. Rettenmaier, Somali Ghosh Sinha
Economic growth has varied considerably over the past decade across the country. The dashboard below illustrates the varied growth in terms of the change in inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2011 and 2021 by Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). In the dashboard, inflation-adjusted GDP growth for MSAs is compa...

Population Growth Around the State of Texas

Posted: December 22, 2022 by Dennis W. Jansen, Somali Ghosh Sinha, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
From 2010 to 2021, the United States’ population grew 7.1%.  During that same time span,  Texas grew 17.4%.  Texas’s growth rate was third among the fifty states, only trailing  Idaho and Utah. Within Texas, the population growth rates varied by metropolitan areas and by counties.  The interact...

The Geographic Distribution of Income: The View Based on Tax Returns

Posted: December 01, 2022 by Dennis W. Jansen, Somali Ghosh Sinha, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
As income inequality has grown in the United States in recent years, much of the focus has been on the concentration of income at the top of the distribution. The dashboards below provide another way to look at the distribution of income by focusing on the geography of the income distribution. The dashboards use data from the Stat...

Watching the Labor Market for a 'Soft Landing'

Posted: October 07, 2022 by Somali Gosh Sinha, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
As Wall Street and Main Street track and interpret the Federal Reserve’s every move, we are reminded in related news stories that the Fed’s actions are governed by its goals to keep the inflation rate both stable and low, while also keeping the unemployment rate low.  With inflation rates at levels not seen since the 1980s, the ...

The Pandemic Misery Index of North American States/Provinces

Posted: May 06, 2021 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
Over the past year, the Private Enterprise Research Center has presented its Pandemic Misery Index, or PMI, to assess how different states and metropolitan areas have fared over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. PERC’s PMI adds together the COVID-19 death rate per 10,000 of population to the average unemployment rate over the period ...

Pandemic Misery Index: February 2021 Update for Metropolitan Areas

Posted: February 26, 2021 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
The Private Enterprise Research Center introduced the Pandemic Misery Index (PMI) to provide a simple metric to measure the performance of various political entities for both states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. This post provides an update to our reported PMI values for various MSA’s throu...

PERC’s Pandemic Misery Index Updated -- How the States Stack Up

Posted: December 09, 2020 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
The PMI is an easy-to-use metric of how states are dealing with the twin crises brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, the public health crisis and the economic crisis.  Taking a cue from Arthur Okun’s misery index that added together the inflation rate and the unemployment rate, PERC’s PMI includes a measure of the public heal...

2020 Pandemic Misery Index: Update for Metropolitan Areas

Posted: November 09, 2020 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
The Private Enterprise Research Center introduced the Pandemic Misery Index (PMI) to provide a simple metric to measure the performance of various political entities, both states and metropolitan statistical areas (or MSA’s) in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.  This posting provides an update to our earlier reported PMI values for ...

2020 Pandemic Misery Index: Assessing Metropolitan Areas in the U.S.

Posted: October 05, 2020 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
Last month, the Private Enterprise Research Center published the Pandemic Misery Index (PMI) for states, which measures the effects of the pandemic on each state and the states’ responses to the pandemic in terms of impact on health an...

2020 Pandemic Misery Index: How the States Stack Up

Posted: September 08, 2020 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
Which state has been more effective at dealing with Covid-19, New York or Texas? Who has done better at stemming the spread of the virus and keeping businesses afloat, California or Florida?   The answer to these questions depends on how we define and measure ‘effectiveness.’  As shelter-in-place orders...

New U.S. Unemployment Insurance Claims Drop to 2.1 Million for the Week Ending May 23; Number of Insured Unemployed Decline

Posted: May 29, 2020 by Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
For the week that ended on May 23, 2020, 2,123,000 workers filed unemployment insurance (UI) claims. This is the eighth week that initial weekly claims have declined from the previous week. Initial claims averaged a week-to-week decrease of 13.5% since April 4th. The highest initial claims were recorded the week ending March 28 when they reached...

U.S. Unemployment Insurance Claims Fall to 2.4 Million for the Week Ending May 16; Texas’ April Unemployment Rises to 12.8%

Posted: May 22, 2020 by Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
For the week that ended on May 16, 2020, 2,438,000 workers filed unemployment insurance (UI) claims. This is the seventh week that initial weekly claims have declined from the previous week. The highest initial claims were recorded the week ending March 28 when they reached 6,867,000.  In the last nine weeks, we have seen 38.6 million initi...

Over 30 Million Unemployment Claims During the Last Six Weeks

Posted: May 01, 2020 by Dennis W. Jansen, Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
For the week that ended on April 25, 2020, 3,839,000 workers filed unemployment insurance (UI) claims. The revised count for the week ending April 18 is 4,442,000 claims. The highest initial claims were recorded the week ending March 28, when they reached 6,867,000. In the last six weeks, we have seen over 30 million initial claims, a number whi...

Medicare Around the Country

Posted: December 11, 2019 by Carlos I. Navarro, Andrew J. Rettenmaier
PERC’s Medicare Maps have been updated this year using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Medicare Geographic Variation da...