Search Results
Report
The Rhode Island labor market in recovery: where is the skills gap?
There has been much anecdotal evidence claiming that Rhode Island's labor force is unable to supply the skills that the state's employers seek. The anecdotal evidence has given rise to the concern that labor market mismatch is holding back the state's economic recovery. Such a concern comes with particularly high stakes in the case of Rhode Island, which suffered the most severe drop in employment in New England during the Great Recession and has endured the region's highest unemployment rate during the recovery. This paper conducts a data-driven analysis of several indicators of potential ...
Working Paper
Mobility and Engagement Following the SARS-Cov-2 Outbreak
We develop a Mobility and Engagement Index (MEI) based on a range of mobility metrics from Safegraph geolocation data, and validate the index with mobility data from Google and Unacast. We construct MEIs at the county, MSA, state and nationwide level, and link these measures to indicators of economic activity. According to our measures, the bulk of sheltering-in-place and social disengagement occurred during the week of March 15 and simultaneously across the U.S. At the national peak of the decline in mobility in early April, localities that engaged in a 10% larger decrease in mobility than ...