Research

A recent online survey asked, "should employees have the right to decide, without force or penalty, whether to join or leave a labor union?" Nearly 83 percent of New York respondents said yes, they should. Read More

New York City and its suburbs continue to account for most of the year-over-year job growth in New York State, according to the latest data. Read More

Massive but partially hidden funding shortfalls are a feature, not a bug, of New York City's public pension system and its counterparts across the country. Read More

Move over, Jimmy Fallon. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced last week that New York State will steer $16 million in subsidies to CBS to keep the "Late Show" in Manhattan under its next host, Stephen Colbert. Read More

Local government is a labor-intensive business, and employee compensation is the single biggest element of most municipal budgets. The 2013-14 edition of What They Make, the Empire Center's annual report on public payrolls, allows New York taxpayers to compare this key element of local government costs around the state... Read More

The property tax cap for New York counties, towns and villages with fiscal years starting January 1, 2015 will start at 1.56 percent, slightly lower than last year's starting rate of 1.66 percent. The cap in each locality will vary based on the amount of applicable allowable exclusions for growth in local property values. Localities also will be able to exclude the amount by which the change in pension contributions exceeds two percentage points Read More

If GE and IBM have some truly great and promising ideas for next-generation semiconductor materials, why do they need a New York taxpayer subsidy to develop them? Ira Stoll has provided some answers in a must-read column. Read More

Most high-income New York City residents who left the city in 2012 moved to neighboring jurisdictions, according to a new analysis of federal Census data by the city Independent Budget Office (IBO). Today's Times claims this shows that wealthy New Yorkers are not "fleeing the city for tax havens." But who says they are? Besides, compared to the city, suburban New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are tax havens. Read More

After seven months of foot-dragging, New York's economic development agency finally got around to answering the Empire Center's request for details of state spending on an advertising campaign promoting the Start-Up NY tax-free zone program. The total price tag for the campaign over the past year has been nearly $35 million, most of it spent on TV commercials outside and inside New York State, according to the summary we received. Read More

New York State's year-over-year private sector job creation rate remained behind the national average in June. Seventy percent of the new jobs were in New York City, and upstate employment barely grew at all. Read More

No matter how much the left wants to expand government, no matter how much the right wants to cut taxes, both ought to observe a fundamental rule of government spending: Never use one-shot revenues to fund recurring operating expenses. Read More

New York will reap a state budget windfall of at least $3.3 billion in fines paid by the big French bank BNP Paribas after it pleaded guilty recently to violating sanctions against transactions in Cuba, Sudan and Iran. So, how should the money be spent? Read More