Research

As the economy continued its slow post-pandemic reopening, New York State continued to slowly regain jobs—but preliminary data indicate there was no improvement in the state's unemployment rate in July. Read More

Governor Cuomo has ordered local governments to “reinvent” their police departments or risk losing state and federal funding, but the back-up guidance from Cuomo's office sets up an arduous process that likely will conflict with other parts of state law. To put it plainly, the guidance shows the state’s “New York Tough” governor won’t take on its police unions. Read More

"With massive budget deficits looming, Mayor de Blasio’s post-pandemic plan boils down to hoping for a stopgap federal bailout and asking Albany for permission to issue billions in deficit bonds. This won’t solve the problem. New York needed a much leaner, more efficient public sector even before the novel coronavirus blew a hole in its tax base." Read More

Governor Cuomo continues to burn while pols in Washington fiddle around the issue of providing more aid to states and localities in yet another federal stimulus bill. Meanwhile, New York State's plummeting revenues still haven't hit their post-pandemic bottom, according to the First Quarterly Update to the state's FY 2021 Financial Plan. Read More

New York City's five municipal public pension funds ended their 2020 fiscal year with a net investment gain of 4.44 percent, well below their 7 percent assumed rate of return. That shortfall, reflecting the pandemic recession and its impact on financial markets, is expected to drive up the city's annual tax-funded pension costs by up to $200 million within the next three years. Read More

New York's per-capita Medicaid spending soared to more than double the nationwide rate in 2018, widening its gap with the other 49 states. Read More

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