Research

Anyone following New York’s redistricting process knows it is desperately behind schedule and hopelessly caught up in political squabbling. Read More

The State of the State is the prelude to Hochul’s state budget reveal. It’s a budget that represents a generational opportunity. Read More

A puzzling pattern has emerged from New York's latest wave of the pandemic: Downstate hospitals are dealing with the lion's share of COVID patients, but upstate hospitals are the ones running out of beds. The parado Read More

The Scoping Plan prepared by the Climate Action Council claims benefits of up to $430 billion from the Climate Act. Read More

In her State of the State address this week, Governor Hochul prominently called for a $10 billion "multi-year investment" in the state's health care system, including $4 billion earmarked for wages and bonuses, with a Read More

In her first State of the State message today, Governor Kathy Hochul pledged to accelerate scheduled personal income tax cuts for "middle class" New Yorkers, with a fiscal impact she pegged at $1.2 billion. That figure sounds large but doesn't amo Read More

Hochul should “ring out the old” by appointing a subsidy board that will shelve the prevailing-wage expansion Read More

A whole lot of people moved out of New York state after last year’s COVID-19 outbreak and government-imposed lockdown restrictions. Read More

Thanks mainly to a pandemic-driven boost in its already high outflows to other states, New York has just suffered its largest single-year population loss ever—and the worst, in percentage terms, of any state in the p Read More

New York can have 100 percent zero emissions electricity in 2040. But it can’t have enough of it to keep the lights and the heat on. Read More

With judicious use of her veto pen this month, Governor Hochul could draw a line against spiraling health expenses for consumers and taxpayers. Several health insurance-related Read More

New York taxpayers have been hit with enormous increases in pension costs for state and local government employees over the past 20 years. From less than $1 billion in 2000, combined annual employer contributions to the Empire State’s public pension funds escalated to nearly $10 billion by 2010, peaking at nearly $17 billion in 2015. Contributions have leveled off at roughly $16 billion in recent years—but under lenient government accounting standards, even that figure conceals the full long-term cost of generous, locked-in pension benefits for generations of retired government employees.  Read More