The authors look at the level of job losses that would be sustained if substantial cuts were made in federal spending on defense contracting in Massachusetts. They compares those impacts with potential cuts at a similar scale to education, healthcare, construction or clean-energy spending,...

The importance of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in combating poverty in our country by alleviating hunger was driven home anew during the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the subsequent tepid economic recovery. The program is credited with preventing a dramatic increase in hunger...

The City of New Haven is considering outsourcing its public school custodial services to a private firm. Outsourcing would cut the cost of services in half, saving the city $8.1 million, or 19% percent of the deficit. But in this analysis of the impacts of the cuts, Jeannette Wicks-Lim finds...

Evidence from surveys of migrating households, the existing economic literature, and new analysis using data from the Internal Revenue Service all suggest that taxes do not play any notable role in causing people to leave a state. The most important factors in influencing household migration are...

Revised July 2011James K. Boyce and Matthew Riddle have updated earlier anlysis that examines the household-level impacts of a cap-and-dividend plan, and how they differ between states. In this paper, the authors not only consider the specific parameters of the 2010 CLEAR Act, but also add an...

The authors demonstrate that the average state or local government worker earns higher wages than the average private-sector worker—but only because they are, on average, older and substantially better educated. More than half of state and local government employees in New England have a...

The factors that allow the launch of a speculative attack, such as those on he government debts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy in 2010, are always multiple. In this case, they can be found in some simultaneous events (e.g. the regional German elections of the 9th of May), in some...