The billions of dollars funneled from New York's treasury to movie and TV producers had no statistically significant impact on the industry's employment in the Empire State through 2017, according to a new multi-state study of such tax incentives. Read More
New York’s public-sector collective bargaining law, the Taylor Law, is unique in that it’s the only law that people risk breaking by discussing it. The Empire Center launched “Dues and Don’ts” to help public employers fulfill their obligation to educate employees about their rights without fear of improper practice charges under the Taylor Law. Visit the Dues & Don'ts website to learn more. Read More
New York has dished out more on film-tax credits since 2003, about $5 billion overall, than it would have on the Amazon deal, E.J. McMahon, founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany. Read More
Today's jobs report from the state Labor Department carried the usual "Jobs at All-Time High" headline (when the "high" disappears, think recession). Also as usual, the April numbers showed a wide regional variation in private job creation rates around the state—and New York as a whole continues to trail employment growth nationally. Read More
Newly revised data from the state Labor Department indicate New York's regional economic performance gap has grown larger in the last year. On a year-to-year basis, the state gained 103,900 private-sector jobs in January—a growth rate of 1.3 percent at a time when the U.S. as a whole was growing by 2.1 percent, according to the state Labor Department's monthly jobs report. Read More
The collapse of New York's effort to lure Amazon's "second headquarters" to Queens with more than $3 billion in city and state incentives sheds fresh light on a bigger, ongoing corporate subsidy—New York State's Film and TV Production Credit. Read More
There has been a sharp and growing economic divide between upstate and downstate. Read More
When it comes to rhetorical use of upstate New York unemployment statistics, Governor Cuomo is consistent. Unfortunately, he's consistently misleading. The latest example came at today's ribbon-cutting today for the new 136,000-square-foot Expo Center at the state fairgrounds in Syracuse, where Cuomo delivered a roughly 25-minute stream-of-consciousness riff that focused on what he portrayed as an economic turnaround in upstate and the Syracuse area. Read More