Research

New York State’s biggest public pension lost money on its investments during the fiscal year that ended March 31—a completely unsurprising result, given the coronavirus crisis and its impact on financial markets in early spring. Read More

New York's Medicaid program is growing at its fastest rate in six years, with a quarter-million additional enrollees landing in the safety-net health plan during the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic.  Read More

State lawmakers this week moved to make public construction more expensive in a bid to steer work to one of New York’s struggling construction unions. Read More

While New York's economy continued to ever-so-slowly recover in June, the Empire State's year-to-year percentage decline in private employment since the pandemic lockdown remained the worst in the continental U.S., according to the latest payroll establishment data from federal and state agencies. Read More

The average cost of New Yorkers' health benefits increased by less than the national average in 2019 but remained among the highest in the U.S., according to recently published federal data. Read More

The state's Medicaid spending was significantly lower than projected in the first quarter, but that's not necessarily a positive sign for state finances. Read More

The rules governing public employment in New York are expressly designed to make it time-consuming and expensive to hold workers accountable for poor performance or misconduct. Read More

Some of New York City's leading progressive Democrats are mounting a campaign to pressure Governor Cuomo into backing a big new "wealth tax" on New York billionaires. Read More

Because New York was hit with the coronavirus early, before testing was widely available, its official count of infections – at just over 400,000 – vastly understates the scale of its outbreak. Read More

New York’s slow reopening has begun just in time for a virtual April 15 — Tax Day 2.0, pushed back three months by the novel-coronavirus pandemic. In a way, it’s the end of an era: The tax returns due to be filed on Wednesday will report incomes earned in 2019, the close of a decade-long economic expansion. Read More

Empire Center's E.J. McMahon talks with Bill Hammond about New York's nursing home polices throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More

Predicting doom and gloom for New York is all the rage. While we do face difficult fiscal choices for the next several years, those with skin in the game are contradicting this “death of New York” narrative — and offering a way out. Developers across the city are asking communities for nothing more than regulatory permission to add jobs, mixed-income housing and new high-quality public spaces. Yet just this week, Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer denounced a multi-billion dollar investment in offices and homes in Long Island City — shortly after denouncing 2,700 new mixed-income homes in Astoria. Read More