We updated this piece on the four-day school week, originally published in June 2018, on July 15, 2023 to include new research and other information.

More than 2,100 public schools in 25 states have switched to a four-day school week, often in hopes of recruiting teachers, saving money and boosting student attendance, researchers estimate.

Small, rural schools facing significant teacher shortages have led the trend, usually choosing to take off Mondays or Fridays to give employees and students a three-day weekend every week. To make up for the lost day of instruction, school officials typically tack time onto the remaining four days.

In some places where schools made the change, school district leaders have marveled at the resulting spikes in job applications from teachers and other job seekers. Teacher shortages, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, have plagued public schools nationwide for decades.

“The number of teacher applications that we’ve received have gone up more than 4-fold,” Dale Herl, superintendent of the Independence, Missouri school district, told CBS News late last year.

The impact on students, however, has not been as positive. Although peer-reviewed research on the topic is limited, focusing only on a single state or small group of states, there is evidence that some groups of students learn less on a four-day schedule than on a five-day schedule.

A new analysis of student performance in six states — Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming — finds that students who went to class four days a week, as a whole, made less progress in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. Kids on a four-day schedule earned lower reading scores on a spring assessment known as the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, on average.

However, the authors of the paper, published last month, also found that the condensed schedule had little to no effect on the rural students they studied, on average. Schools located in towns and suburbs, on the other hand, saw student performance drop considerably after adopting a four-day week.

The authors also discovered differences among student groups. For example, Hispanic students going to class four days a week made less progress in math during the school year than white students on the same schedule. White students made less progress in math than Native American students during the 11-year study.

“For policymakers and practitioners, this study addresses previous ambiguity about the effects of four-day school weeks on academic outcomes and provides evidence supporting concerns about four-day school week effects on student achievement and growth, particularly for those implemented in non-rural areas,” write the authors, Emily Morton, Paul Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld.

In the spring before the COVID-19 pandemic, a total of 662 public school districts used the schedule — up more than 600% since 1999, Thompson and Morton write in a 2021 essay for the Brookings Institution. That number climbed to 876 during the 2022-23 academic year, they told The Journalist’s Resource in email messages.

In addition to studying the schedule’s effect on student achievement, researchers are also investigating its impact on other aspects of school operations, including education spending, student discipline and employee morale. To make the research easier to find, the University of Oregon’s HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice has created the Four-Day School Week Research Database.

Anyone can use the interactive platform to sift through research completed as of May 2023. It’s worth noting that most research in the database is not peer-reviewed journal articles. Seventy of the more than 100 papers are student dissertations, theses and other papers.

If you keep reading, you’ll find that we have gathered and summarized several relevant journal articles below. To date, the scholarly literature indicates:

• Some schools cut instructional time when they adopt a four-day schedule.
• The impact of a four-day school week differs depending on a range of factors, including the number of hours per week a school operates, how the school structures its daily schedule and the race and ethnicity of students.
• The condensed schedule does not save much money, considering employee salaries and benefits make up the bulk of school expenses. In a 2021 analysis, Thompson estimates schools save 1% to 2% by shortening the school week by one day.
• Staff morale improves under a four-day school week.
• Fighting and bullying decline at high schools.

Both Thompson and Morton urged journalists to explain that the amount of time schools dedicate to student learning during four-day weeks makes a big difference.

“It’s pretty critical to the story that districts with longer days (who are possibly delivering equal or more instructional time to their students than they were on a five-day week) are not seeing the same negative impacts that districts with shorter days are seeing,” Morton, a researcher at the American Institutes of Research, wrote to JR in late 2023.

In a follow-up conversation with JR in July 2024, Morton pointed out that parents like the four-day schedule despite concerns raised by education scholars. In interviews with researchers, she wrote, “parents mention that they appreciate the additional family time and perceive other benefits of the schedule for their children, and they overwhelmingly indicate that they would choose to keep a four-day schedule over switching back to a five-day schedule.”

Morton would not recommend schools adopt a four-day schedule if their main aim is saving money, boosting student attendance or recruiting and retaining teachers. Research findings “do not provide much support for the argument that four-day school weeks are delivering the intended benefits,” she wrote to JR.

Keep reading to learn more. We’ll update this collection of research periodically.

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A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week On Student Achievement and Growth
Emily Morton, Paul N. Thompson and Megan Kuhfeld. Economics of Education Review, June 2024.

Summary: This study looks at how switching to a four-day school week affects student achievement over the course of the school year in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. A key takeaway: On average, across those six states, students on a four-day schedule learned less during the school year than students who went to class five days a week. However, students in rural areas fared better on that schedule than students in “non-rural” areas.

Researchers studied the scores that students in grades 3-8 earned on an assessment called the Measures of Academic Progress Growth, administered each fall and spring to gauge how much kids learned over the course of the school year. The analysis uses 11 years of test score data in reading and math, collected from the 2008-09 to the 2018-19 academic year.

Researchers found that students who went to school four days a week, as a whole, made smaller gains in reading during the academic year than students who went five days a week. They also earned lower scores in reading on the spring assessment, on average.

When researchers looked at the data more closely, however, they found differences between students attending rural schools and students attending schools located in towns and suburbs — communities the researchers dubbed “non-rural.”

Although adopting a four-day schedule had little to no impact on kids at rural schools, student performance fell considerably at schools in non-rural areas. Those children, as a whole, made less progress in reading and math during the academic year than children attending non-rural schools that operated five days a week. They also earned lower scores in both reading and math on the spring exam.

“The estimated effects on math and reading achievement in non-rural four-day week schools are ‘medium’ and meaningful,” the researchers write, adding that the difference is roughly equivalent to a quarter of a school year worth of learning in the fifth grade.

Researchers also discovered that student performance at schools with four-day schedules varied by gender and race. At schools using a four-day-a-week schedule, girls made smaller gains in reading and math than boys, on average. Hispanic students made less progress in math than white students, who made less progress in math than Native American students.

“The estimated effects on math and reading gains during the school year are not ‘large’ by the developing standards used to interpret effect sizes of education interventions, but they are also not trivial,” the researchers write. “For the many districts and communities who have become very fond of the schedule, the evidence presented in this study suggests that how the four-day school week is implemented may be an important factor in its effects on students.”

Impacts of the Four-Day School Week on Early Elementary Achievement
Paul N. Thompson; et al. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2nd Quarter 2023.

Summary: This study is the first to examine the four-day school week’s impact on elementary schools’ youngest students. Researchers looked at how children in Oregon who went to school four days a week in kindergarten later performed in math and English Language Arts when they reached the third grade. What they found: Overall, there were “minimal and non-significant differences” in the test scores of third-graders who attended kindergarten on a four-day schedule between 2014 and 2016 and third-graders who went to kindergarten on a five-day schedule during the same period.

When the researchers studied individual groups of students, though, they noticed small differences. For example, when they looked only at children who had scored highest on their pre-kindergarten assessments of letter sounds, letter names and early math skills, they learned that kids who went to kindergarten four days a week scored a little lower on third-grade tests than those who had gone to kindergarten five days a week.

The researchers write that they find no statistically significant evidence of detrimental four-day school week achievement impacts, and even some positive impacts” for minority students, lower-income students,  special education students, students enrolled in English as a Second Language programs and students who scored in the lower half on pre-kindergarten assessments.

There are multiple reasons why lower-achieving students might be less affected by school schedules than high achievers, the researchers point out. For example, higher-achieving students “may miss out on specialized instruction — such as gifted and enrichment activities — that they would have had time to receive under a five-day school schedule,” they write.

Effects of 4-Day School Weeks on Older Adolescents: Examining Impacts of the Schedule on Academic Achievement, Attendance, and Behavior in High School
Emily Morton. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2022.

Summary: Oklahoma high schools saw less fighting and bullying among students after switching from a five-day-a-week schedule to a four-day schedule, this study finds. Fighting declined by 0.79 incidents per 100 students and bullying dropped by 0.65 incidents per 100 students.

The other types of student discipline problems examined, including weapons possession, vandalism and truancy, did not change, according to the analysis, based on a variety of student and school data collected through 2019 from the Oklahoma State Department of Education and National Center for Education Statistics.

“Results indicate that 4-day school weeks decrease per-pupil bullying incidents by approximately 39% and per-pupil fighting incidents by approximately 31%,” writes the author, Emily Morton, a research scientist at NWEA, a nonprofit research organization formerly known as the Northwest Evaluation Association.

Morton did not investigate what caused the reduction in bullying and fighting. She did find that moving to a four-day schedule had “no detectable effect” on high school attendance or student scores on the ACT college-entrance exam.

Only a Matter of Time? The Role of Time in School on Four-Day School Week Achievement Impacts
Paul N. Thompson and Jason Ward. Economics of Education Review, February 2022.

Summary: Student test scores in math and language arts dipped at some schools that adopted a four-day schedule but did not change at others, according to this analysis of school schedule switches in 12 states.

Researchers discovered “small reductions” in test scores for students in grades 3 through 8 at schools offering what the researchers call “low time in school.” These schools operate an average of 29.95 hours during the four-day week. The decline in test scores is described in terms of standard deviation, not units of measurement such as points or percentages.

At schools offering “middle time in school” — an average of 31.03 hours over four days — test scores among kids in grades 3 through 8 did not change, write the researchers, Paul N. Thompson, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University, and Jason Ward, an associate economist at the RAND Corp., a nonprofit research organization.

Scores also did not change at schools providing “high time in school,” or 32.14 hours over a four-day school week, on average.

When describing this paper’s findings, it’s inaccurate to say researchers found that test scores dropped as a result of schools adopting a four-day schedule. It is correct to say test scores dropped, on average, across the schools the researchers studied. But it’s worth noting the relationship between test scores and the four-day school week differs according to the average number of hours those schools operate each week.

For this analysis, researchers examined school districts in states that allowed four-day school weeks during the 2008-2009 academic year through the 2017-2018 academic years. They chose to focus on the 12 states where four-day school weeks were most common. The data they used came from the Stanford Educational Data Archive and “a proprietary, longitudinal, national database” that tracked the use of four-day school weeks from 2009 to 2018.

The researchers write that their findings “suggest that four-day school weeks that operate with adequate levels of time in school have no clear negative effect on achievement and, instead, that it is operating four-day school weeks in a low-time-in-school environment that should be cautioned against.”

Three Midwest Rural School Districts’ First Year Transition to the Four Day School Week
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe-Zarain. The Rural Educator, 2019.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of parents who live in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 584 parents in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies significant differences in the perceptions of parents classified by the age of children, special education identification, and free and reduced lunch status. Strong parental support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated; however, families with only elementary aged children and families with students receiving special education services were less supportive than other groups.”

Juvenile Crime and the Four-Day School Week
Stefanie Fischer and Daniel Argyle. Economics of Education Review, 2018.

Abstract: “We leverage the adoption of a four-day school week across schools within the jurisdiction of rural law enforcement agencies in Colorado to examine the causal link between school attendance and youth crime. Those affected by the policy attend school for the same number of hours each week as students on a typical five-day week; however, treated students do not attend school on Friday. This policy allows us to learn about two aspects of the school-crime relationship that have previously been unstudied: one, the effects of a frequent and permanent schedule change on short-term crime, and two, the impact that school attendance has on youth crime in rural areas. Our difference-in-difference estimates show that following policy adoption, agencies containing students on a four-day week experience about a 20 percent increase in juvenile criminal offenses, where the strongest effect is observed for property crime.”

Staff Perspectives of the Four-Day School Week: A New Analysis of Compressed School Schedules
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools for decades to respond to budgetary shortfalls. There has been little peer-reviewed research on the four-day school week that has focused on the perception of staff that work in school districts that have recently switched to the four-day model. This study collects data from 136 faculty and staff members in three rural Missouri school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis identifies strong support of the four-day school week model from both certified educational staff and classified support staff perspectives. All staff responded that the calendar change had improved staff morale, and certified staff responded that the four-day week had a positive impact on what is taught in classrooms and had increased academic quality. Qualitative analysis identifies staff suggestions for schools implementing the four-day school week including the importance of community outreach prior to implementation. No significant differences were identified between certified and classified staff perspectives. Strong staff support for the four-day school week was identified in all demographic areas investigated. Findings support conclusions made in research in business and government sectors that identify strong employee support of a compressed workweek across all work categories.”

The Economics of a Four-Day School Week: Community and Business Leaders’ Perspectives
Jon Turner, Kim Finch and Ximena Uribe–Zarian. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 2018.

Abstract: “The four-day school week is a concept that has been utilized in rural schools in the United States for decades and the number of schools moving to the four-day school week is growing. In many rural communities, the school district is the largest regional employer which provides a region with permanent, high paying jobs that support the local economy. This study collects data from 71 community and business leaders in three rural school districts that have transitioned to the four-day school week within the last year. Quantitative statistical analysis is used to investigate the perceptions of community and business leaders related to the economic impact upon their businesses and the community and the impact the four-day school week has had upon perception of quality of the school district. Significant differences were identified between community/business leaders that currently have no children in school as compared to community/business leaders with children currently enrolled in four-day school week schools. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided concerning the economic impact on their businesses and the community. Community/business leaders’ perceptions of the impact the four-day school week was also evenly divided concerning the impact on the quality of the school district. Slightly more negative opinions were identified related to the economic impact on the profitability of their personal businesses which may impact considerations by school leaders. Overall, community/business leaders were evenly divided when asked if they would prefer their school district return to the traditional five-day week school calendar.”

Impact of a 4-Day School Week on Student Academic Performance, Food Insecurity, and Youth Crime
Report from the Oklahoma State Department of Health’s Office of Partner Engagement, 2017.

Summary: “A Health Impact Assessment (HIA) utilizes a variety of data sources and analytic methods to evaluate the consequences of proposed or implemented policy on health. A rapid (HIA) was chosen to research the impact of the four-day school week on youth. The shift to a four-day school week was a strategy employed by many school districts in Oklahoma to address an $878 million budget shortfall, subsequent budget cuts, and teacher shortages. The HIA aimed to assess the impact of the four-day school week on student academic performance, food insecurity, and juvenile crime … An extensive review of literature and stakeholder engagement on these topic areas was mostly inconclusive or did not reveal any clear-cut evidence to identify effects of the four-day school week on student outcomes — academic performance, food insecurity or juvenile crime. Moreover, there are many published articles about the pros and cons of the four-day school week, but a lack of comprehensive research is available on the practice.”

Does Shortening the School Week Impact Student Performance? Evidence from the Four-Day School Week
D. Mark Anderson and Mary Beth Walker. Education Finance and Policy, 2015.

Abstract: “School districts use a variety of policies to close budget gaps and stave off teacher layoffs and furloughs. More schools are implementing four-day school weeks to reduce overhead and transportation costs. The four-day week requires substantial schedule changes as schools must increase the length of their school day to meet minimum instructional hour requirements. Although some schools have indicated this policy eases financial pressures, it is unknown whether there is an impact on student outcomes. We use school-level data from Colorado to investigate the relationship between the four-day week and academic performance among elementary school students. Our results generally indicate a positive relationship between the four-day week and performance in reading and mathematics. These findings suggest there is little evidence that moving to a four-day week compromises student academic achievement. This research has policy relevance to the current U.S. education system, where many school districts must cut costs.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States offers a 50-state comparison of public school students’ instructional time requirements. For example, students in Colorado are required to be in school for a minimum of 160 days each academic year while in Vermont, the minimum is 175 days and in North Carolina, it’s 185.
• The State of the American Teacher project offers insights into how teachers feel about their jobs and the education field as a whole. In early 2022, RAND Corp. surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, asking questions on topics such as job-related stress, school safety, COVID-19 mitigation policies and career plans. Survey results show that 56% of teachers who answered a question about their attitude toward their job “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching aren’t really worth it.” Meanwhile, 78% “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with the statement, “I don’t seem to have as much enthusiasm now as I did when I began teaching.”
• Opinions about the four-day school week vary among school board members, district-level administrators, school principals and teachers. These organizations can provide insights: the Schools Superintendents Association, National School Boards Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals and National Association of Secondary School Principals.

Looking for more research on public schools? Check out our other collections of research on student lunches, school uniforms, teacher salaries and teacher misconduct.

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Journalists can’t report accurately on research involving human subjects without knowing certain details about the sample of people researchers studied. It’s important to know, for example, whether researchers used a nationally representative sample.

That’s important whether a journalist is covering an opinion poll that asks American voters which presidential candidate they prefer, an academic article that examines absenteeism among U.S. public school students or a clinical trial of a new drug designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

When researchers design a study, they start by defining their target population, or the group of people they want to know more about. They then create a sample meant to represent this larger group. If researchers want to study a group of people across an entire country, they aim for a nationally representative sample — one that resembles the target population in key characteristics such as gender, age, political party affiliation and household income.

Earlier this year, when the Pew Research Center wanted to know how Americans feel about a new class of weight-loss drugs, it asked a sample of 10,133 U.S. adults questions about obesity and the effects of Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs. Pew designed the survey so that the answers those 10,133 people gave likely reflected the attitudes of all U.S. adults across various demographics.

If Pew researchers had simply interviewed 10,133 people they encountered at shopping malls in the southeastern U.S., their responses would not have been nationally representative. Not only would their answers reflect attitudes in just one region of the country, the individuals interviewed would not represent adults nationwide.

A nationally representative sample is one of several types of samples used in research. It’s commonly used in research that examines numerical data in public policy fields such as public health, criminal justice, education, immigration, politics and economics.

To accurately report on research, journalists must pay close attention to who is and isn’t included in research samples. Here’s why that information is critical:

1. If researchers did not use a sample designed to represent people from across the nation, it would be inaccurate to report or imply that their results apply nationwide.

A mistake journalists make when covering research is overgeneralizing the results, or reporting that the results apply to a larger group of people than they actually do. Depending on who is included in the sample, a study’s findings might only apply to the people in the sample. Many times, findings apply only to a narrow group of people at the national level who share the same characteristics as the people in the sample — for example, individuals who retired from the U.S. military after 2015 or Hispanic teenagers with food allergies.

To determine who a study is designed to represent, look at how the researchers have defined this target population, including location, demographics and other characteristics.

“Consider who that research is meant to be applicable to,” says Ameeta Retzer, a research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Applied Health Sciences.

2. When researchers use a nationally representative sample, their analyses often focus on what’s happening at a national level, on average. Because of this, it’s never safe to assume that national-level findings also apply to people at the local level.

“As a word of caution, if you’re using a nationally representative sample, you can’t say, ‘Well, that means in California …,” warns Michael Gottfried, an applied economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

When researchers create a nationally representative sample of U.S. grade school students, their aim is to gain a better understanding of some aspect of the nation’s student population, Gottfried says. What they learn will represent an average across all students nationwide.

“On average, this is what kids are doing, this is how kids are doing, this is the average experience of kids in the United States,” he explains. “The conclusion has to stay at the national level. It means you cannot go back and say kids in Philadelphia are doing that. You can’t take this information and say, ‘In my city, this is happening.’ It’s probably happening in your city, but cities are all different.”

3. There’s no universally accepted standard for representativeness.

If you read a lot of research, you’ve likely noticed that what constitutes a nationally representative sample varies. Researchers investigating the spending habits of Americans aged 20 to 30 years might create a sample that represents this age group in terms of gender and race. Meanwhile, a similar study might use a sample that represents this age group across multiple dimensions — gender, race and ethnicity along with education level, household size, household income and the language spoken at home.

“In research, there’s no consensus on which characteristics we include when we think about representativeness,” Retzer notes.

Researchers determine whether their sample adequately represents the population they want to study, she says. Sometimes, researchers call a sample “nationally representative” even though it’s not all that representative.

Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center, has questioned the accuracy of election research conducted with samples that only represent U.S. voters by age, race and sex. It’s increasingly important for opinion poll samples to also align with voters’ education levels, Kennedy writes in an August 2020 report.

“The need for battleground state polls to adjust for education was among the most important takeaways from the polling misses in 2016,” Kennedy writes, referring to the U.S. presidential election that year.

4. When studying a nationwide group of people, the representativeness of a sample is more important than its size.

Journalists often assume larger samples provide more accurate results than smaller ones. But that’s not necessarily true. Actually, what matters more when studying a population is having a sample that closely resembles it, Michaela Mora explains on the website of her research firm, Relevant Insights.

“The sheer size of a sample is not a guarantee of its ability to accurately represent a target population,” writes Mora, a market researcher and former columnist for the Dallas Business Journal. “Large unrepresentative samples can perform as badly as small unrepresentative samples.”

If a sample is representative, larger samples are more helpful than smaller ones. Larger samples allow researchers to investigate differences among sub-groups of the target population. Having a larger sample also improves the reliability of the results.

5. When creating samples for health and medical research, prioritizing certain demographic groups or failing to represent others can have long-term impacts on public health and safety.

Retzer says that too often, the people most likely to benefit from a new drug, vaccine or health intervention are not well represented in research. She notes, for example, that even though people of South Asian descent are more likely to have diabetes than people from other ethnic backgrounds, they are vastly underrepresented in research about diabetes.

“You can have the most beautiful, really lovely diabetes drug,” she says. “But if it doesn’t work for the majority of the population that needs it, how useful is it?”

Women remain underrepresented in some areas of health and medical research. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health began requiring that women and racial and ethnic minorities be included in research funded by the federal agency. Before that, “it was both normal and acceptable for drugs and vaccines to be tested only on men — or to exclude women who could become pregnant,” Nature magazine points out in a May 2023 editorial.

In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidance on developing plans to enroll more racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials for all medical products.

When journalists cover research, Retzer says it’s crucial they ask researchers to explain the choices they made while creating their samples. Journalists should also ask researchers how well their nationally representative samples represent historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities, sexual minorities, people from low-income households and people who don’t speak English.

“Journalists could say, ‘This seems like a really good finding, but who is it applicable to?’” she says.

The Journalist’s Resource thanks Chase Harrison, associate director of the Harvard University Program on Survey Research, for his help with this tip sheet.  

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As artificial intelligence infiltrates virtually every aspect of life, more states in the U.S. are seeking to regulate (or at least monitor) its use. Many are passing legislation, issuing policy rules or forming committees to inform those decisions. In some cases, that includes health insurance, where AI holds great promise to speed and improve administration but also brings potential for peril, including racial bias and omissions inherent in formulas used to determine coverage approvals.

Meanwhile, major health insurers Humana, Cigna, and UnitedHealth all face lawsuits alleging  that the companies improperly developed algorithms that guided AI programs to deny health care. The suit against Cigna followed a ProPublica story revealing “how Cigna doctors reject patients’ claims without opening their files.” The class action suits against United Health and Humana followed an investigative series by STAT, in which reporters revealed that multiple major health insurers had used secret internal rules and flawed algorithms to deny care.

Journalists should pay attention to guardrails governments are seeking to erect to prevent problematic use of AI — and whether they’ll ultimately succeed as intended. Both federal and state governments report they are working to prevent discrimination, a broad concern as AI systems become more sophisticated and help administrators make decisions, including what’s covered by a policy. Proposed state legislation and regulatory guidelines aim to require health insurance companies to be more transparent about how their systems were created, what specific data sets are fed into those systems and how the algorithms that instruct a program’s decision-making are created.

We’ve created this guide to help journalists understand the nascent regulatory landscape, including proposed state laws; which regulators are compiling and issuing guidelines; and what researchers have learned so far.                                       

Government efforts to regulate AI use among health insurers

Who regulates health insurers, and how, depends largely on the type of health insurance itself. Congress and the Biden administration are stepping up efforts to form a blueprint for AI use, including in health insurance.

State-level resolutions and legislation

For local journalists, this complex landscape provides an avenue rich with potential reporting opportunities.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 40 states introduced or passed legislation aimed at regulating AI in the 2024 legislative session through March 17, with at least half a dozen of these actions tied to health care. Six states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands adopted resolutions or enacted new laws.

That’s on top of 18 states and Puerto Rico’s adoption of resolutions or legislation tied to AI in 2023, according to data from the NCSL. Many states are modeling regulations to include guidance from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) issued in December 2023.

The Colorado Division of Insurance, for example, is mulling how to apply new rules adopted by the state legislature in 2021, which are designed to be a check for consumers on AI-generated decisions. It was the first state to target AI use in insurance, according to Bloomberg.

Colorado’s insurance commissioners have so far issued guidance for auto and life insurers under the statute. In recent months, commissioners held hearings and called for written comments to help form its approach to applying the new rules to health insurers, according to materials on the agency’s website.

Colorado’s legislation seeks to hold “insurers accountable for testing their big data systems – including external consumer data and information sources, algorithms, and predictive models — to ensure they are not unfairly discriminating against consumers on the basis of a protected class.”  In Colorado, protected class includes race, color, religion, national origin/ancestry, sex, pregnancy, disability, sexual orientation including transgender status, age, marital status and familial status, according to the state’s Civil Rights Division.

There isn’t yet a firm timeline for finalizing these rules for health insurance because the agency is still early in the process as it also works on life insurance, Vincent Plymell, the assistant commissioner for communications and outreach at the Colorado Division of Insurance, told The Journalist’s Resource.

In California, one bill sponsored by the California Medical Association would “require algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other software tools used for utilization review or utilization management decisions” be “fairly and equitably applied.” Earlier language that would have mandated a licensed physician supervise AI use for decisions to “approve, modify, or deny requests by providers” was struck from the bill.

In Georgia, a bill would require coverage decisions using AI be “meaningfully reviewed” by someone with authority to override them. Illinois,  New York,  Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma are also among states that introduced legislation tied to health care, AI and insurance.

Several states including Maryland, New York, Vermont and Washington state have issued guidance bulletins for insurers modeled after language crafted by the NAIC. The model bulletin, issued in December 2023, aims to set “clear expectations” for insurers when it comes to AI. The bulletin also has standard definitions for AI-related terms, like machine learning and large language models.

A group of NAIC members is also developing  a survey of health insurers on the issue.      

One concern insurers have is that rules may be different across states, Avi Gesser, a data security partner at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, told Bloomberg Law.

“It would be a problem for some insurers if they had to do different testing for their algorithm state-by-state,” Gesser said in a November 2023 article. “Some insurers may say, ‘Well, maybe it’s not worth it—maybe we won’t use external data, or maybe we won’t use AI.’”

It’s useful for journalists to read published research to learn more about how artificial intelligence, insurers and health experts are approaching the issue technically, politically and legally. To help, we’ve curated and summarized several studies and scholarly articles on the topic.      

Research Roundup:    

Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Predicting and Preventing Insurance Claim Denials for Economic and Social Wellbeing
Marina Johnson, Abdullah Albizri and Antoine Harfouche. Information Systems Frontiers, April 2021.

The study: The authors examine AI models to help hospitals identify and prevent denials of patient insurance claims, aiming to cut the costs of appeals and reduce patient emotional distress. They examine six different kinds of algorithms to recommend the best model for predicting claim rejections and test it in a hospital. The authors use “white box” and “glass box” models, which reveal more data and mechanisms in an AI program than “black box” models, to develop what they label a Responsible Artificial Intelligence recommendation for an AI product to solve this problem.

In developing the proposed solution, the authors take into account five principles: transparency, justice, a no-harm approach, accountability and privacy.

To develop their proposal, the researchers used a dataset of 57,458 claims from a single hospital submitted to various insurance companies. They caution that their experiment involved using data from a single hospital.

The findings      
The solution the authors propose seeks to identify, in part, errors in coding and billing, medical needs, and mismatched codes for services and procedures to a patient’s diagnosis. Once flagged by the system the error can be fixed before submitting to an insurance company. That may spare the insured patient from going through the appeals process. The technical solution proposed by the authors “delivers a high accuracy rate” at about 83%, they write.

They recommend future research use data from insurance companies in which “many providers submit claims, providing more generalizable results.”

The authors write: “Insured patients suffering from a medical condition are overburdened if they have to deal with an appeal process for a denied claim. An AI solution similar to the one proposed in this study can prevent patients from dealing with the appeal process.”

Fair Regression for Health Care Spending
Anna Zink and Sherri Rose. Biometrics, September 2020.

The study: In this study, the authors examine and suggest alternative methods to predict spending in health insurance markets so insurers can provide fair benefits for enrollees in a plan, while more accurately gauging their financial risk. The authors examine “undercompensated” groups, people who are often underpaid by health insurance formulas, including people with mental illness or substance abuse disorders. They then suggest new tools and formulas for including these groups in regression analysis used to calculate fair benefits for enrollees. Regression analysis is a way of parsing variables in data to glean the most important factors in determining risk, what the impact is and how robust those factors are in calculations used to predict fair benefits and coverage.   

The findings: In their analysis, the authors use a random sample of 100,000 enrollees from the IBM MarketScan Research database in 2015 to predict total annual expenditures for 2016. Almost 14% of the sample were coded with a diagnosis of mental health and substance abuse disorder. When insurance companies “underpredict” spending for groups like these, “there is evidence that insurers adjust the prescription drugs, services, and providers they cover” and alter a plans’ benefit design “to make health plans less attractive for enrollees in undercompensated groups.”

The authors propose technical changes to formulas used to calculate these risks to produce what they find are more inclusive results for underrepresented groups, in this case those categorized as having mental health and substance use disorders. One of their suggested changes meant a 98% reduction in risk that insurers would be undercompensated, likely leading to an improvement in coverage for that group. It only increased insurer risk tied to predicting cost for enrollees without mental health and substance use disorders by about 4%, or 0.5 percentage points. The results could lead to “massive improvements in group fairness.”

The authors write: “For many estimators, particularly in our data analysis, improvements in fairness were larger than the subsequent decreases in overall fit. This suggests that if we allow for a slight drop in overall fit, we could greatly increase compensation for mental health and substance use disorders. Policymakers need to consider whether they are willing to sacrifice small reductions in global fit for large improvements in fairness.”

Additional reading: The authors outline this and two other studies tied to the topic in a November 2022 policy brief for the Stanford University Human Centered Artificial Intelligence group.

The Imperative for Regulatory Oversight of Large Language Models (or Generative AI) in Healthcare
Bertalan Meskó and Eric J. Topol. NPJ Digital Medicine, July 2023.

The article: In this article, the authors argue a new regulatory category should be created specifically for large language models in health care because they are different from previous artificial intelligence mechanisms in scale, capabilities and impact. LLMs can also adapt their responses in real-time, they note. The authors outline categories regulators could create to harness — and help control — LLMs.

By creating specific prescriptions for managing LLMs, regulators can help gain the trust of patients, physicians and administrators, they argue.

The findings: The authors write that safeguards should include ensuring:
• Patient data used for training LLMs are “fully anonymized and protected” from breaches, a “significant regulatory challenge” because violations could run afoul of privacy laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA.)
• Interpretability and transparency for AI-made decisions, a “particularly challenging” task for “black box” models that use hidden and complex algorithms.
• Fairness and safeguards against biases. Biases can find their way into LLMs like Chat GPT-4 during model training that uses patient data, leading to “disparities in healthcare outcomes.”
• Establishing data ownership, something that’s hard to define and regulate.
• Users don’t become over-reliant on AI models, as some AI models can “hallucinate” and yield errors.

The authors write: “LLMs offer tremendous promise for the future of healthcare, but their use also entails risks and ethical challenges. By taking a proactive approach to regulation, it is possible to harness the potential of AI-driven technologies like LLMs while minimizing potential harm and preserving the trust of patients and healthcare providers alike.”

Denial—Artificial Intelligence Tools and Health Insurance Coverage Decisions
Michelle M. Mello and Sherri Rose, JAMA Health Forum, March 7, 2024

The article: In this Forum article, the authors, both professors of health policy,   call for national policy guardrails for AI and algorithmic use by health insurers. They note investigative journalism helped bring incidents to light in cases tied to Medicare Advantage as well as congressional hearings and class-action lawsuits against major health insurance companies.

The authors highlight and describe class-action suits against UnitedHealthcare and Humana that allege the companies pressured managers to discharge patients prematurely based on results from an AI algorithm. They also note Cigna, another insurance firm, is facing a class action suit alleging it used another kind of algorithm to deny claims at an average of 1.2 seconds each.
Algorithms can now be trained “at an unprecedented scale” using datasets such as Epic’s Cosmos, which represents some 238 million patients, the authors note.  But even developers may not know the mechanics behind — or why — an AI algorithm makes a recommendation.

The authors write: “The increased transparency that the CMS, journalists, and litigators have driven about how insurers use algorithms may help improve practices and attenuate biases. Transparency should also inspire recognition that although some uses of algorithms by insurers may be ethically unacceptable, others might be ethically obligatory. For example, eliminating the use of (imperfect) algorithms in health plan payment risk adjustment would undermine equity because adjusting payments for health status diminishes insurers’ incentive to avoid sicker enrollees. As the national conversation about algorithmic governance and health intensifies, insurance-related issues and concerns should remain in the foreground.”

Additional resources for journalists

• This research review and tip sheet from The Journalist’s Resource offers a primer, definitions and foundational research on racial bias in AI in health care. 

• The Association of Health Care Journalists  on its website features a guide to how health insurance works in each state. Created by Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms and supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the guide provides useful statistics and resources that give journalists an overview of how health insurance works in each state. That includes a breakdown of different kinds of insurance that serve the population in each place, including how many people are covered by Medicare, Medicaid and employer-backed insurance. The guide can help inform journalist’s questions about the health insurance landscape locally, says      Joe Burns, the beat leader for health policy (including insurance) at AHCJ.

• The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has a map of which states adopt its model bulletin as well as a page documenting the work of its Big Data and Artificial Intelligence working group.

• Congress.gov features a clickable map of state legislature websites.

•The National Conference of State Legislatures tracks bills on AI for legislative sessions in each state. This list is current as of March 2024.

• The National Center for State Courts links to the websites of state-level courts.

• Here’s the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s final rule and fact sheets under the 21st Century Cures Act.

• Here’s a video and transcripts of testimony from a Feb. 8 U.S. Senate Finance hearing titled “Artificial Intelligence and Health Care: Promises and Pitfalls.”    

• KFF, formerly called the Kaiser Family Foundation, maintains a map showing what percentage of each state’s population is covered by health insurance.

The post The possibilities and perils of AI in the health insurance industry: An explainer and research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Sports venue construction in the U.S. tends to happen in waves, roughly every three decades. Sports economists suggest another wave is happening now, with numerous proposed or approved venue construction projects around the country seeking or having secured public dollars, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to Nevada to Florida.  

Professional sports owners often justify asks of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars for new or revamped stadiums with estimates of huge economic returns for communities. It’s important that journalists covering these projects understand how public dollars are raised to pay for them and how to interrogate economic impact claims that teams produce.

Across the four biggest sports leagues in the U.S. — Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League — there have been eight new venues built since 2020 at a total construction cost of roughly $3.3 billion, according to a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects, not including bond interest, the paper finds.

Research conducted over decades indicates these investments almost never lead to massive economic gains for host cities. Legislators have since pushed the recent public contribution figure even higher. This includes $500 million to renovate the Milwaukee Brewers ballpark, more than $1 billion in bonds toward a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans and $380 million for a new ballpark for the A’s, which are poised to move from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2028.

We recently published two pieces on public financing of sports venues: A research-based primer and research roundup and a short tipsheet for covering the topic.

To give journalists an even stronger foundation for their coverage of sports venue financing, The Journalist’s Resource co-hosted an hourlong webinar May 16 with Econofact, a nonpartisan, online publication out of The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

I co-moderated the panel discussion with Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts and founder and executive editor of Econofact. The panelists were:

• Andrew Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods Professor Emeritus of Economics at Smith College.
• Victor Matheson, a professor of economics and accounting at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports economics.
• Alan Snel, the publisher of LVSportsBiz.com, a news outlet that covers the convergence of sports, business, stadiums and politics.

One takeaway: There are numerous examples of professional sports franchises that built their venues with little or no public investment.

“We have the Golden State Warriors playing in an entirely privately financed stadium in San Francisco,” Matheson said during the webinar. “We have SoFi stadium in [Los Angeles], almost entirely privately financed there, and that’s about a $5 billion stadium. I think one of the most important things to take from this hour is that public financing is not required.”

Here are 7 key tips from the webinar.

1. Ask these three questions about economic impact estimates. If team officials can’t explain their numbers, don’t report them.

Who commissioned the study?

“If it is a study that is paid for by the league or the team, that is not an economic impact study,” Matheson said. “That is a press release.”

Can I see a copy of the study?

While teams or municipalities may or may not release lengthy economic impact reports, public officials and journalists sometimes cite big number estimates from teams without scrutiny of the underlying analysis.

“You would be amazed by how many people say, ‘There is a study that says [the economic impact] is a billion dollars,” Matheson said. “But you can never get your hands on that study.”

What do economists think?

“Call an economist,” Matheson said. “You can find lots of us. Whatever your local jurisdiction is, there’s a sports economist there who teaches in your state or your local region who understands these issues who has a good local feel. Most of us have a good national feel as well.” 

If team representatives can’t justify estimates of economic growth, or show than an independent analysis exists, don’t report those estimates.

“The big problem with these gigantic economic impact numbers is that the methodology is not explained,” said Snel.

He noted that LVSportsBiz will not publish economic impact estimates unless team officials explain how they did their analysis. 

2. Note that when people spend money at a sports venue and nearby businesses, this often means they don’t spend that money elsewhere.

A new or revamped sports venue tends to shift economic activity, not create new spending, economic research shows.

Interview an economist or two to help explain to audiences how this works. The basic idea is that spending shifts within communities, or from one community to another. The underlying reason has to do with household budgeting.

“Most of the money spent at a sports facility is money that is part of people’s leisure budgets, and they have a certain amount of money that they can spend on various kinds of leisure,” Zimbalist said. “When they spend $200 or $500 taking their family to the ballpark, that’s $200 or $500 they don’t have to spend at the local bowling alley, at a local theater, at a local restaurant. That’s money being displaced, from spending in one part of the city to spending in another, and the net impact can be very close to zero.”

3. Ask hotel owners and rental car firms how they incorporate tax rate changes into their pricing. If public money is raised through hotel and rental car taxes, proponents may claim the tax burden will fall on tourists. But local businesses and franchises may bear some of the burden, too.

Tourists do not necessarily pay hotel and rental car taxes. Why? Because of something called tax incidence, which is how the burden of a tax is divided among consumer and producer — essentially, who pays the tax and at what proportion.

“It’s not always the person who buys the product who pays the tax,” Matheson said. “It can also be the person who sells the product.”

When legislators increase a hotel tax or pass a new one, hotel owners typically respond by adjusting their pricing in one of three ways:

• Raise prices and pass on the entire cost of the tax to consumers. That can hurt their ability to compete for convention and tourism business, Matheson said.
• Hold prices steady and pay the tax burden entirely, reducing profits.
• Some combination, where they pass some of the cost of the tax to consumers and eat the rest.

The same goes for rental car taxes, another sales tax commonly used to help finance stadiums. Local economic conditions will determine how the tax burden shakes out. In extremely competitive markets, businesses may be able to pass on the entire cost to consumers. Point is, it’s important to ask hotel owners and rental car firms how they incorporate tax rate changes into their pricing.

While officials may claim visitor taxes are a way to pass the cost to out-of-towners, the authors of the September 2023 paper note that local people also rent cars. And residents with lower incomes are more likely to use extended stay hotels and potentially have to pay the higher taxes.

4. Don’t forget that team owners stand to benefit most from these projects.

Teams seeking public financing naturally focus public statements on their estimates of community benefits, typically in the form of jobs created and consumer spending.

But team owners, by far, have the most to gain.

“The bottom line is, it’s the pro teams that are garnering the benefits of the revenues from the stadiums,” Snel said. He recommended journalists also report on how new or improved stadiums affect team valuations.

He pointed to the National Football League’s Raiders, which moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. The team was valued at $2.2 billion in 2019. That figure nearly tripled to $6.2 billion by the end of 2023.

There are a variety of reasons for the increase, Snel reports, including TV deals that generate tens of billions of dollars yearly across the NFL, and the sale of the Washington Commanders in 2023 for more than $6 billion, which set the market for premium franchises. But according to Forbes, $1.4 billion of the team’s current value is tied to the stadium itself, which was heavily subsidized with public dollars.

5. Learn about “leakage” and how it can affect economic impact estimates.

When people spend money at local businesses, there is less of what economists call “leakage” than when people spend with mega corporations like sports franchises.

This means every dollar spent at a local café has a better chance of staying within the local economy than money spent at a sporting event, which tends to “leak” out of the economy and into the savings accounts of team owners. The café owner, by contrast, uses revenue to, for example, pay staff, who also live and spend in the community, or for laundry services provided by another local businesses, or any number of other things.

“The proprietor of the local restaurant or bowling alley or theater tends to have a more moderate income and tends to live almost 100% of the year in that town,” Zimbalist said. “When you spend money at the restaurant, it tends to circulate and stay in the town more. When you spend money at a ballpark, it’s going to millionaires and billionaires. They generally don’t live in the town year-round.”

This ties back into those economic impact estimates. They’ll sometimes include a simple multiplier equation, suggesting money spent at sporting events “multiplies,” or circulates within the local economy, just like spending at the local café.

But sporting event spending tends to have less chance of staying in the local economy, compared with other types of entertainment spending.

Zimbalist explained that team owners “generally have much, much higher savings rates, so they take the money and they put it into the world’s money markets and the money doesn’t stay in the town for these and other reasons. So the leakages are much, much greater and, therefore, the multiplier, the sports multiplier, is much lower than a typical entertainment multiplier.”

6. Keep track of lease deals. When they expire, teams may come asking for more public money.

When covering a city that has a major professional sports franchise, or several of them, review lease agreements to figure out when team owners might ask taxpayers for help revamping their venue, or building a new one.

The National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University Law School has obtained dozens of lease agreements for professional baseball and football franchises, most of them from the 1990s and early 2000s.

The institute has summarized these agreements, available here. The summaries detail, among other things, the yearly rent the franchise owes the municipality, which may be set below market rates. They outline how much the public contributed toward sports venue construction and how much came from the team, along with whether the team or municipality is responsible for regular operating expenses and repairs.

“We had this huge wave of stadium construction in 1992,” Matheson said. “Most of those stadiums are associated with a 30-year lease deal. And because of that, these teams are tied to the stadiums for 30 years, which means that they really can’t start asking for a new stadium, start asking for new public subsidies, until those lease deals expire. But as soon as those lease deals expire, all of the bargaining power shifts to the teams and away from the taxpayer.”

7. If you don’t have time to do a deep dive, at least include these two “boilerplate necessities” in your reporting.

Journalists may not have time to do a deep investigation into how public money is being used to finance sports venue construction or renovation — especially broadcast journalists, who might only have a minute or two to cover a lot of ground.

Snel recommends reporters at least include these two “boilerplate necessities” in their coverage.

• Report the principal and interest on debt. If public money is raised through bonds, tell audiences about the interest on the principal that the city, county or state will have to repay. For example, Clark County, Nevada, took on debt of $750 million toward building the Raiders’ stadium. With interest, that number will grow over the next quarter century. The final tally will actually be north of $1.3 billion, Snel recently reported.
• Remind your audience that economic activity related to sporting events by and large goes back to team owners. “The beneficiaries are the teams,” Snel said. “They’re garnering the lion’s share of all the revenues.”

The post Public financing of sports venues: 7 reporting tips from our webinar appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Former Congressman Tip O’Neill famously said “all politics is local.”

The same applies to election administration in the U.S., which is markedly decentralized. On Election Day, county- and city-level poll workers are the people who make sure voters can smoothly cast their ballots for measures and candidates vying for offices spanning all levels of government.

But this fundamental democratic function isn’t free, and election administrators often say they have a lot to do on limited budgets, research shows. State and local governments — not the federal government — are usually responsible for election administration costs.

Some of the biggest ongoing costs are related to statewide voter registration rolls, which can cost millions of dollars a year to build and maintain, according to to a 2022 report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart III.

Costs associated with individual elections include staffing, supplies for polling places and postage for mail-in ballots. Local election agencies have to pay for return postage in 19 states, plus Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Postal Service will typically deliver any ballot that lacks enough postage, billing the appropriate election agency later, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Longer-term costs include upgrading equipment such as scanners that process paper ballots.

Nearly 80% of voters used paper-and-scanner technology during the 2020 election. Most of the remaining voters used direct-recording electronic machines. With those devices, voters use touch screens or push buttons to record their votes digitally, which may or may not include a paper trail.

Nationally, equipment costs would run $100 million to $300 million yearly if each scanner were replaced at the end of its useful life, around ten years, according to the MIT report. As of 2022, the voting equipment used in 24 states was over a decade old, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

“Election officials are used to ‘making do’ with what they have,” Stewart writes. “They often express pride in pulling off the complicated logistical maneuvers necessary to conduct elections on a shoestring budget.”

Revenue from sales and property taxes are one major source of funding for elections, according to the 2022 MIT report. While federal grants have sporadically been available since 2002, “there is no ongoing federal mechanism for funding the general expenses of administering elections,” according to a September 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

The question of who pays to run elections gained national news attention during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were, for example, sudden additional costs related to widespread mail-in voting and personal protective equipment for election workers and volunteers.

And there’s not solely government money involved.

For the 2020 election cycle, “private individuals funded grant programs for state and local election administration that were particularly notable in their scale and sources,” according to the CRS report.

Philanthropist Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Meta, were the leading donors, committing up to $419.5 million for election administration, including for personal protective equipment.

That commitment was roughly 20% of one estimate of the typical cost of administering elections across the U.S. and about half the $825 million Congress appropriated for state and local election administration in 2020. (That federal appropriation was atypically large due to the pandemic-era challenges — by comparison, Congress appropriated nothing for state and local elections during the 2016 cycle, according to the CRS report.)

A raft of misinformation about the Chan-Zuckerberg funding followed President Joe Biden’s November 2020 win over former President Donald Trump. At the same time, Republican state legislators and conservative groups pushed to remove private dollars from election administration.

There are now 28 states that limit, regulate or prohibit private or charitable funding for elections, according to the NCSL. In 2020, the electoral votes from 22 of those states went to Trump while five went to Biden. Nebraska, which allocates its electoral votes differently from nearly every other state and often splits its electoral votes, sent one to Biden and four to Trump in 2020.

All legislation related to private funding of elections has been passed since 2020, according to the NCSL.

With the new legislation and a variety of election financing systems across the country, it can be confusing to know where to begin to help audiences understand how their elections are funded. These research-based tips will give you a solid base for reporting on election administration funding in your coverage area.

1. Get to know state rules on how localities can finance elections.

Start with this list, compiled by the NCSL, of states that have passed laws about private funding of elections. Note whether your state prohibits all private funding, or limits such funding in some cases.

Alabama, for example, prohibits state and local election officials from soliciting or accepting “any donation in the form of money, grants, property, or personal services from an individual or a nongovernmental entity for the purpose of funding election-related expenses or voter education, voter outreach, or voter registration programs.”

But Alabama election officials can accept a donation of physical space for voting provided by private entities, such as a brick-and-mortar business donating its store for use as a polling place. If there is a state public health emergency, election officials in that state can accept “the donation of items for the preservation or protection of the public health.”

In South Carolina, by contrast, state and county election agencies cannot accept “gifts, donations, or funding from private individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, or any third party not provided through ordinary state or county appropriations,” without exceptions. And in Texas, local election officials cannot accept financial contributions over $1,000 without written notice from the secretary of state, who must first obtain unanimous approval from key state leaders, including the governor.

2. Ask election officials if they have enough funding. If not, how much do they need and for what?

Legal scholars have described adequate election funding as a fundamental pillar of the right to vote. “Unlike most other rights, the right to vote relies on governments to build, fund, and administer elections systems,” write law professors Joshua Sellers and Justin Weinstein-Tull in a 2021 New York University Law Review article. “This obligation is not ancillary to the right to vote; it is foundational to it.”

Ask local election officials if they have enough funding for 2024. If not, how much do they think they need and what specific outcomes would additional funding help achieve? What tradeoffs would there be — would more funding for elections mean less funding for other needs?

While election administrators will likely say they would gladly take more funding, there is scant research that provides points of comparison to assess outcomes of increased funding — for example, whether election agencies serving similar constituencies do their jobs differently depending on funding levels.

3. Don’t assume localities with high tax revenues spend more on election administration.

Recent research has focused on parsing the local costs of elections. In a 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review article, Sellers and law professor Roger Michalski seek to correct what they call the “shamefully inadequate amount of information about how much our elections cost.”

Sellers and Michalski use a “novel and painstakingly hand-coded dataset,” on election costs at the local and state levels from 2010 to 2017 across four states that make up nearly one-third of the national population: California, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Part of the challenge in analyzing election spending data across and within states is that agencies record their election-related expenses differently. The authors found that some agencies provide detailed expenditures down to the cost of postage, while others more broadly record costs.

They do not find connections between election funding and demographic factors such as race, poverty and educational attainment.

“Election spending in majority-minority communities seems largely indistinguishable from spending in predominantly white communities,” Sellers and Michalski write. “In short, basic assumptions one might have about resource allocation are brought into question.”

Sellers and Michalski also estimate that election spending in the four states is typically in the range of $4.50 to $8.50 per capita. This is in line with other research, including a 2018 data collection project on elections held in more than half of states from 2009 to 2016, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That research estimates an average U.S. cost per voter of $8 per election, but substantial variation across states, with costs as high as $15 per voter in Florida and as low as $2 per voter in Michigan.

Sellers and Michalski also find wide variation in election spending. For example, in California many cities “spend less than a dollar per person per year on election expenditures, while others spend many multiples more,” they write. Those findings hold for the other states in the study, and, generally, wealthier cities do not necessarily spend more per capita to administer elections than cities with lower tax revenues.

Spending tends to be higher in areas where governments overlap: “In many places, municipalities and counties work in concert to organize, run, and fund elections,” Sellers and Michalski write.

Election administration spending can vary even within counties. Someone living in a large city that is part of a county with sprawling suburbs might take part in elections funded at both the city and county levels, while a suburban voter might only have elections funded by the county.

4. Explain why election administration funding matters.

One big reason funding matters: Election officials need to be able to purchase technology and ballot designs that accurately records voters’ choices.

For example, the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was notably affected by punch card ballots, with so-called “hanging chads” making voter intentions unclear and directly leading to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which provided federal funding to upgrade local voting systems.

Scholars who study elections use something called the residual vote rate to measure the relative ability of election agencies to perform their fundamental task of recording voter intentions. As Stewart writes in a 2018 MIT Election Lab blog post, “the number of residual votes is usually calculated by taking the number of people who turned out and subtracting the number of votes cast for candidates.”

In other words, a residual vote is when a ballot is cast that includes votes for some but not all races on the ballot. The authors of a 2020 paper in the Public Administration Review explore residual vote rates in North Carolina by dividing the number of ballots cast in presidential election years from 1996 to 2012 by the number of votes for president.

Presidential ballots often also include races for local or state offices, and ballot measures. For example, a residual vote would be counted when a ballot includes a vote for a senate race and a ballot measure, but is missing a vote for president.

“Though some proportion of residual votes might be the choice of the voter (some people choose not to vote for particular offices), scholarship revealed that residual votes were systematically related to the type of voting equipment and ballot design,” the authors write.

Sufficient funding generally allows people running and working for organizations to develop expertise and “provide for better technology and assistance,” the authors write, citing past research. The authors further explain in the paper that “the residual vote rate is an important managerial outcome of election administration.”

Although the authors analyze only one state, they note that, over time, they are able to explore residual voting in the same local administration organizations, which differ in their ability to run elections but have the same funding mechanisms.

“We find that both managerial capacity and better technology significantly reduce the residual vote rate as would be predicted by theory and literature,” the authors conclude.

5. Know that the health of the U.S. economy may affect election administration spending.

Research has found that how the broader economy is doing can affect spending on election administration.

A 2020 paper in American Politics Research examines county-level spending on elections from 2005 to 2016 in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio. This timeframe overlapped with the Great Recession, which began in late 2007 and ended in mid-2009. The authors note they chose those states based primarily on the availability of detailed financial data for county election offices.

During and after the recession, election-related spending in these states fell sharply, and stayed lower than before the recession, even as the economy slowly began to recover.

“Unfortunately, just because democracy may need significant funds to conduct an election, it does not always mean that election administrators have sufficient resources,” the authors conclude.

The post 5 things to know about election administration funding: A research-based tip sheet appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

When sports franchises want a new or revamped stadium, they often turn to taxpayers for help with financing. For example, in June 2023, Nevada legislators approved $380 million in public funding for a 30,000-seat ballpark for the Oakland A’s, who are expected to make the move to Las Vegas in 2028.

Proponents estimate the A’s stadium in Las Vegas will create thousands of jobs and have an annual economic impact of $1.3 billion — more on that in the video below.

But economic research for decades has found that, by and large, the fiscal returns for residents — in the form of increased economic activity and job growth — are far smaller than public expenditures, which have recently approached or exceeded half a billion dollars per stadium.

Learn about the research in our companion explainer and research roundup.

Journalists should look closely at the political context around these major financial commitments, and question estimated fiscal returns. This is not just a topic for sports or business journalists covering major professional teams — even minor league teams have meant financial hardship for towns that took on debt to attract them. Here are 4 tips to help you get started in your reporting.

1. Interrogate economic impact statements or fiscal estimates from franchise owners.

Teams often produce economic impact statements or fiscal estimates claiming that building new stadiums or revamping existing ones will result in a fiscal and jobs boom for a city or region.

What assumptions do these economic impact statements or fiscal estimates make? Do they fully explain how they arrived at their numbers? If not, will the team publicly provide those behind-the-scenes details? Know that franchises may not make their analyses public.

For example, reporter Jon Styf at digital news outlet The Center Square obtained a two-page document showing economic impact estimates from the state of nearly $1 billion per year from a proposed retail and housing development around a new stadium for the National Football League’s Tennessee Titans.

The document also included economic impact estimates of around half a billion dollars from other cities hosting major events, such as the Super Bowl. Styf reached out to economists to find out whether those estimates were reasonable — the economists questioned their credibility.

In short, avoid reporting team-published estimates at face value. Run them by an economist or two who study this topic. Reach out to the North American Association of Sports Economists for help finding experts. FieldofSchemes, a blog run by journalist Neil deMause that covers sports economics, is another place to look for informed perspectives on economic impact estimates.

2. Know that public financing for a sports stadium can happen either through a legislature or through a direct decision by voters.

The Las Vegas funding happened via lawmakers, for example.

While Kansas City voters in April 2024 voted down public funds for a new stadium for MLB’s Royals, 7 in 10 voters in Oklahoma City who cast ballots in December 2023 said yes to $900 million for a new arena for the NBA’s Thunder. (Dozens of local economists had urged Oklahoma Cityans to reject the measure.)

Public votes may go either way, and can be influenced by campaigns from local groups in favor or opposed — but the legislative pathway is almost always successful, says Kennesaw State University economist John Charles Bradbury.

3. Understand how states and localities finance stadium construction.

These may include municipal bonds or taxes, such as sales taxes, sin taxes on things like alcohol and tobacco, and visitor taxes on hotels and rental cars.

Officials may claim visitor taxes are a way to pass the cost to out-of-towners. As Bradbury and co-authors note in a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, local people also rent cars. And residents with lower incomes are more likely to use extended stay hotels and have to pay the higher taxes.

Hotel owners may also draw lower revenues as they reduce pre-tax prices in order to retain customers — or, they may raise prices, passing the tax to customers but deterring future bookings.

4. Scrutinize smaller localities issuing bonds for minor or major league stadiums.

Pearl, Mississippi, issued tens of millions of dollars in bonds to build a new ballpark for an Atlanta Braves minor league affiliate in the early 2000s.

But, due to lack of attendance and lower economic impact than boosters estimated, the city had trouble paying the debt.

Credit agencies reduced the city’s bonds to junk.

(They’ve since rebounded.)

Bonus viewing: Healthy journalistic skepticism of economic impact claims

Alan Snel, publisher of LVSportsBiz.com, expressed healthy journalistic skepticism about economic impact numbers from sports franchises on the Dec. 29, 2023 edition of public affairs show Nevada Week, which is produced by Vegas PBS.

Host Amber Renee Dixon asked Snel about economic impact estimates for a new ballpark for the A’s that representatives from economic advisory firm Applied Analysis had presented to state lawmakers.

“They said they expect a $1.3 billion economic impact per year from the stadium and generating about $17 million in total tax revenue each year,” Renee Dixon said. “Those numbers don’t sit well with you. Why is that?”

Snel explained those estimates were “based on certain expectations” about attendance. He then said he had recently interviewed Michael Crome, Chief Financial Officer of the Las Vegas Raiders, which moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020. “And they came out with a press release saying that the stadium and the visitorship, thanks to the Raiders events and also the stadium events, generated $2.29 billion,” Snel said. “That’s nearly $2.3 billion in revenue.”

Snel continued, “And I said to the Raiders, if you want to sit down and explain the math, we will report that. And I think that’s responsible journalism. But just putting these broad, general multibillion dollar figures out there without explaining the math is just — it’s just not an accurate portrait of what’s going on.”

The post Covering sports stadium financing? Read these 4 tips. appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

In June 2023, Nevada legislators approved $380 million in public funding for a 30,000-seat ballpark for the Oakland A’s, who are expected to throw their first pitch in Las Vegas in 2028 after Major League Baseball owners approved the franchise move in November.

It’s the latest public commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars for a professional sports stadium. In the U.S., most franchises in the four major sports leagues — MLB, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League — are valued at over $1 billion.

Across those leagues there have been eight new stadiums or arenas built since 2020, at a total construction cost of roughly $3.3 billion, according to a September 2023 paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. About $750 million in public funds went toward those construction projects, the paper finds.

When government dollars are allocated it’s usually through a legislature passing a law, or by public vote. Voters in Kansas City, for example, in April 2024 widely rejected a sales tax bump to pay for a new downtown stadium for MLB’s Royals.

“I like to say that you can fit a majority of the city council in the owner’s box but you can’t fit a majority of the electorate,” says Kennesaw State University economist John Charles Bradbury.

The approved public funding in Las Vegas represents about one quarter of the total cost of the planned stadium, pegged at $1.5 billion. Proponents estimate the A’s stadium in Las Vegas will create thousands of jobs and have an annual economic impact of $1.3 billion, news outlets have reported.

Economic research for decades has found that, by and large, the fiscal returns for residents — in the form of increased economic activity and job growth — are far smaller than public expenditures, which have recently approached or exceeded half a billion dollars per stadium.

This primer will help journalists understand the history of public financing for stadium construction and empower them to use academic research to interrogate claims that these projects mean big bucks for communities.

The research also finds:

• Journalists often report figures from press releases and economic impact statements without questioning the assumptions of those analyses.
• Of the dozens of stadiums built in the past two decades for the four largest American sports leagues, about 4 in 10 were financed at least in part with municipal bonds exempt from federal taxes — which places part of the financial burden of stadium financing on residents nationwide.
• Football and baseball stadiums may increase foot traffic to nearby businesses, but basketball and hockey arenas do not.
• Overall, stadiums tend to shift economic activity, not create new spending.
• Expansion teams are likely to favor markets that already have strong employment and business growth.

A coming stadium construction boom?

Las Vegas is hardly alone. Economists have found that every 30 years or so there’s a wave of public financing for building stadiums or revamping existing ones.

A construction boom may already be under way in the U.S.

For example, Wisconsin will provide $500 million to renovate the Milwaukee Brewers ballpark, and more than $1 billion in public bonds will go toward a new stadium for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans. And the MLB’s Tampa Bay Rays have asked St. Petersburg city councilors to approve more than $400 million for a new ballpark along with nearby infrastructure improvements.

If you’re covering public financing for sports franchises, you’ll want to know what the research says about this topic. This is critical to providing thorough coverage to audiences.

A brief history of public financing for sports stadiums

Modern stadiums were first constructed during the early and mid-1900s, around the two world wars.

“Sports venues were almost exclusively privately financed until the 1930s, when they became largely public ventures,” write the authors of a recent paper in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, featured in the research roundup below.

More stadiums were built as leagues expanded and teams moved cities throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Another construction boom came in the 1990s, with many new stadiums replacing older ones, along with new venues for expansion franchises.

“The median public share of venue construction costs declined from 70% in the 1990s and 2000s to approximately half of construction costs in the 2010s,” write the authors of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management paper. “Newly opened and planned venues in the 2020s have received roughly 40% of funding from taxpayers.”

While the share of public financing has fallen, the authors find that the amount of public money has risen, from a median of $168 million in public funds per stadium in the 1990s, to $350 million in the 2010s, to $500 million in the 2020s across the four major U.S. sports leagues.  

Even stadiums ostensibly built with private funds can come with public costs.

For example, the New England Patriots built Gillette Stadium in 2002 without direct public dollars, but the franchise benefitted from at least $70 million in state money for nearby road, sewer and other infrastructure improvements, according to the Boston Globe, which the paper authors cite.

Economic activity and stadiums: ‘A transfer of wealth’

While Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field and Soldier Field in Chicago have stood for around 100 years, many stadiums built in the past 50 years have already been replaced for a variety of reasons, despite better construction materials and methods.

For example, the Texas Rangers’ ballparks have been replaced every 27.5 years, on average, while Atlanta Braves’ ballparks have been replaced after 26 years, on average. Among the major sports leagues, 31 stadiums and 31 arenas will be 30 years old or more by 2030, according to Bradbury and co-authors in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management paper.

Journalists covering asks of public money for private sports projects should be aware of the large body of research on these public investments.

Despite perennial claims from team owners that building new stadiums or revamping existing ones will result in a fiscal and jobs boom for a city or region, research consistently shows that the hundreds of millions of public dollars that are often outlaid are not typically a sound investment.

“You might see a little bit of a resurgence in the area right around the stadium, but it comes at a cost to less commerce in the outlying area, which is exactly what we’d expect,” says Bradbury, who is the current president of the North American Association of Sports Economists. “This is just a transfer of wealth within the community.”

This transfer of wealth may indeed be the point for some city officials, as College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson explains in an October 2018 essay, also in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

For example, when the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas, finance local stadiums, such as for the Dallas Cowboys and the Rangers, the games those teams play move consumer dollars from other parts of the state to Arlington.

“While, again, regional economic activity is unchanged, Arlington’s economy benefits at the expense of other cities and towns in the area,” Matheson writes. He also notes that fiscal reports produced by sports franchises “have been shown to suffer from significant theoretical flaws that make their conclusions suspect at best, and simply false at worst.”

But Matheson argues that while the current level of public spending on sports stadiums is out of balance with the returns on those investment, in certain circumstances some level of public funding may be appropriate.

He points to the 2004 Athens Olympics as a catalyst for infrastructure development there, and a minor league baseball stadium in Worcester, Massachusetts, as providing the political impetus for $35 million in transportation funding from the state, including to make a particularly dangerous intersection near the ballpark safer.

“Obviously, it would be better for local taxpayers to get the needed infrastructure improvements without the wasteful expense of hosting the Olympics or building a baseball stadium, but government activities are not always without friction, and using a stadium project to spur other more useful infrastructure projects may be a second-best solution,” Matheson writes.

The cost-per-taxpayer of a stadium partially financed through public funds may be small in some cases, but it can also be relatively large. Oklahoma City Thunder ownership, for example, is contributing $50 million to build their new arena, compared with the public outlay of $900 million, which comes out to thousands of dollars per adult in the city.  

“People often ask me, they’ll say, ‘Well, you’re always against stadiums.’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, yeah, my guess is most pulmonologists are against smoking,’” says Bradbury. “I mean, the evidence is clear. And I think that journalists feel a need to cover all sides of an issue, and I totally understand that. But it’s about accurate coverage, not equal-balance coverage.”

Research roundup

Public Policy Toward Professional Sports Stadiums: A Review
John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, September 2023.

The study: The authors break down a range of policy considerations for public funding of stadiums. They provide a history of stadium funding since the 1900s, examine research efforts to quantify intangible social benefits of sports teams, describe prominent public funding mechanisms and cast a critical eye toward news reporting.

The findings: With many large U.S. cities facing fiscal crises in the 1980s, government officials began to push the narrative of sports stadiums as economic drivers, “where each dollar spent generates more than one dollar of economic activity as it is recirculated within the community — thereby growing employment income, property values and tax revenues,” the authors write.

Economists began to study the issue around this time. By the turn of the century, “economists were largely in agreement that stadiums were poor public investments,” in terms of tangible benefits, like jobs and spending, “and more recent studies continue to confirm these findings.” Economists then began to explore whether there were intangible benefits to residents of a city with a professional sports franchise — the cultural pride from living in a “big league” city, for example.

One way economists do this is through something called the contingent valuation method, which surveys residents on what they would personally pay for their city to host a sports team. These individual values are then extrapolated to a wider population to put a dollar value on the intangible factors residents enjoy from simply having a professional franchise, whether they go to games or not. Based on results from seven studies conducted in the 2000s and 2010s, “non-use values” amount to “13% of total capital construction costs and 16% of public contributions,” suggesting that “intangible social benefits of hosting professional sports teams are well below levels needed to justify typical subsidies.”

In looking at news coverage of public subsidy proposals for sports franchises, the authors note that “economic impact estimates from advocacy reports may be repeated without external validation of credibility, and press release statements from stadium boosters are quoted in stories without critical assessment.”

The authors write: “As a potential institutional reform, communities should assess all stadium proposals through referendums and initiatives, a once-common practice which has declined over the last few decades. Public votes ensure that subsidies are congruent with voter preferences and allow time for careful consideration of all relevant costs and benefits, so that voters can make informed decisions.”

Growth Effects of Sports Franchises, Stadiums and Arena: 15 Years Later
Dennis Coates. Chapter from The Economic Impact of Sports Facilities, Franchises, and Events, October 2023.

The study: The author, who conducted foundational research with Brad Humphreys starting in the mid-1990s into how sports stadiums affect per capita income, returns to this question with another 17 years of data, from 1969 to 2011. This analysis adds hockey and soccer franchises in addition to MLB, NFL and NBA — along with the American Basketball Association, which merged with the NBA in 1976 — and covers all urban areas in the U.S., including those without a professional team.

The findings: Average personal income grew about 1.4% per year over the period studied, regardless of whether there was a sports stadium in the area. The economic effects of sports franchises account for less than 1.5% of local economic activity, measured by personal income, wages and salaries, and wages per job.

The author writes: “The results of this exercise are largely consistent with the findings of Coates and Humphreys and of numerous other studies that have found that the effect of sports franchises and stadium and arena construction on local economies is weak or nonexistent. Indeed, franchises, stadiums, and arenas may be harmful rather than beneficial to the local community.”

Do Local Businesses Benefit from Sports Facilities? The Case of Major League Sports Stadiums and Arenas
Timur Abbiasov and Dmitry Sedov. Regional Science and Urban Economics, January 2023.

The study: The authors explore a single economic consequence of sports stadiums — foot traffic to nearby retail and food establishments — in a single year, 2018, for MLB NBA, NFL and NHL franchises. Precise foot traffic for 92 sports facilities and surrounding businesses is from SafeGraph, a company that tracks “location data of mobile devices with installed participating applications,” the authors write.

They acknowledge that “the grounds for subsidizing professional sports are weak,” based on past research, but also cite news reports suggesting businesses near sports stadiums suffered curtailed revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings: Every 100 visits to a baseball stadium generates 29 visits to nearby restaurants and similar establishments, and six visits to retail stores. The authors find similar results for football stadiums, but little business sale spillover for basketball and hockey arenas. The authors note that professional football and baseball games typically draw much larger crowds than basketball and hockey games.

Basketball and hockey games have a slight negative effect on foot traffic to health, finance and education-related businesses. The authors note that these sports often have arenas located in central business districts, which may lead people who are not going to a game to avoid those areas during game time.

The authors “find that a median sports facility generates approximately $11.3 million of annual additional spending for food and accommodation and retail businesses, with the aggregate spillovers varying substantially across facilities and sports.”

They do not account for negative effects of sports stadiums — such as increased crime, as explained in the next paper — or the revenue of nearby businesses compared with the public costs of building a stadium or improving an existing one.

The authors write: “Our results indicate that the chances of a community economically benefitting from a sports facility via the spillover channel are higher if the facility hosts a popular team and is visited frequently.”

The Impact of Professional Sports Franchises and Venues on Local Economies: A Comprehensive Survey
John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys. Journal of Economic Surveys, September 2022.

The study: The authors review the findings of more than 130 studies on economic outcomes of sports stadiums published between 1974 and 2022, the bulk of them published since 2000.

The findings: Local economic activity is by and large unaffected by sports stadiums, “and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits,” the authors write. There is “deep agreement in research findings” that “sports venues are not an appropriate channel for local development policy,” they add.

Sports stadiums can lead to positive effects for communities, such as improved amenities, like pedestrian-friendly zones. But they also come with negative effects. For example, research links sports events with crime. The “positive association between crime and sporting events is perhaps the most robust empirical finding in the economic effects of sports literature,” the authors write.

Why do sports stadiums continue to garner public subsidies? Among other reasons, such as team owners threatening to relocate, the authors note that the benefits of sports stadium subsidies are concentrated in a few hands — namely and primarily the owners.

Costs, meanwhile, are spread across taxpayers. The public cost of Camden Yards in Baltimore came to $15 per local household per year, according to research from the Brookings Institution that the authors cite. They suggest this creates a situation in which wealthy beneficiaries have great incentive to lobby politicians and advertise in favor of subsidies, with little incentive to mobilize opposition because each taxpayer’s individual cost may be low.

The authors write: “Though findings have become more nuanced, recent analyses continue to confirm the decades-old consensus of very limited economic impacts of professional sports teams and stadiums. Even with added nonpecuniary social benefits from quality-of-life externalities and civic pride, welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of covering public outlays.”

Tax-Exempt Municipal Bonds and the Financing of Professional Sports Stadiums
Austin Drukker, Ted Gayer and Alexander Gold. National Tax Journal, March 2020.

The study: Of the 57 stadiums built in the past two decades for the four largest American sports leagues, about 4 in 10 were financed at least in part with municipal bonds exempt from federal taxes. State or local governments issue the bonds, then the interest bond buyers earn is exempt from federal taxes, meaning “tax-exempt municipal bonds confer an indirect federal subsidy to the issuers,” the authors write. Bond buyers accept lower interest rates — saving interest payment dollars for states and localities — because they know they will get a tax break on their investment return.

NFL stadiums are the most expensive, with an average cost of $1 billion. But baseball stadiums are most heavily financed through tax-exempt bonds. On average, $466 million of baseball stadium costs are financed through such bonds. The authors examine the estimated value of those bonds issued since 2000.

The findings: The value of the federal tax exemption is $3.6 billion across the $16.7 billion worth of bonds issued to finance stadium construction, the authors estimate. But the estimated loss in federal tax revenue is considerably higher: $4.3 billion. The authors explain that the reason for the difference is that a portion of bond buyers would still buy those bonds at a lower return rate than the subsidy offers.

The authors write: “Most residents of, say, New York, Massachusetts, or California — unless they are avid fans — gain nothing from the Washington-area football team’s decision to locate in Virginia, Maryland, or the District of Columbia. Yet, under current federal law, taxpayers throughout the country ultimately subsidize the stadium, wherever it is located … Ultimately, the problem is one of rent seeking, since professional sports leagues are able to extract local and federal subsidies by exerting concentrated power while the costs of the subsidies are diffuse.”

Economic Development Effects of Major and Minor League Teams and Stadiums
Nola Agha and Daniel Rascher. Journal of Sports Economics, November 2020.

The study: The authors explore whether new stadiums for major and minor league teams affect economic development, measured by employment and business growth. They use Census Bureau data from 2004 to 2012 covering 871 markets. There were 65 new teams, 67 teams that departed a city and 68 new stadiums built during the period studied. The included top-tier professional leagues and their development affiliates are MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Soccer, and the Women’s National Basketball Association. The WNBA saw three teams join and five leave the league but was the only professional league without a new arena during the period studied.

The findings: The authors note that much research has focused on the economic effects of major league venues. Stadiums and arenas built between 2000 and 2018 cost more than $40 billion total. Spending on minor league venues account for a sizeable chunk over that time — $9.6 billion, according to the authors, and many of those developmental team venues are in the same market as major league teams.

On the whole, new major league teams and new stadiums do not affect economic development, and the findings suggest teams tend to enter markets with strong employment and business growth. New minor league sports teams also do not tend to affect employment, but for markets between 100,000 and 499,000 people, the findings suggest that new minor league sports stadiums can lead to a slight uptick in new businesses.

The authors write: “Overall, we find no substantial evidence that entry of a new team or stadium is associated with any net gains related to economic development, other than for minor league team entry in smaller markets and employment effects limited to the period of construction.”

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New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier wanted to know what happened to the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who came to the U.S. alone in recent years through the country’s southern border. Most sought to escape extreme poverty in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In her five-part series, “Alone and Exploited,” Dreier demonstrates how a long chain of government failures and willful ignorance allowed this “new economy of exploitation” to grow and thrive.

“This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century,” she writes in the first story in the series, published in February 2023.

“Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine.”

The series also reveals:

• More than 250,000 migrant children arrived alone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, a sharp increase over prior years. As emergency shelters ran out of room, the federal government pressed case managers to work faster to place kids in private homes and loosened some restrictions to make vetting sponsors easier.
• The U.S. government lost track of many migrant children shortly after they left the shelters. “While H.H.S. [the Department of Health and Human Services] checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children,” Dreier writes in the first story in the series. “Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”
• Federal officials missed or overlooked warnings signs about child labor violations, including reports from social workers about dangerous working conditions and reports from the U.S. Department of Labor outlining evidence of child labor trafficking.
• Private audits ordered by several big companies consistently missed child labor violations. “Children were overlooked by auditors who were moving quickly, leaving early or simply not sent to the part of the supply chain where minors were working, The Times found in audits performed at 20 production facilities used by some of the nation’s most recognizable brands,” Dreier writes in the last article in the series, published in December 2023.

Federal and state officials responded quickly to Dreier’s reporting by changing laws, strengthening programs and overhauling some federal agencies. Days after the first story ran, President Joe Biden’s administration announced a crackdown on child labor exploitation. Congress and the Department of Labor launched their own investigations.

Meanwhile, many major companies, including McDonald’s, Costco and PepsiCo, announced their own reforms aimed eliminating child labor across their supply chains, Dreier reported in February 2024.

I interviewed Dreier to learn more about her series and the database she created to ground her coverage. Dreier, who is on maternity leave, answered my five questions by email.

In the short Q&A below, she discusses the database, which contains key details the federal government collected on more than 550,000 migrant children from January 2015 through May 2023, and why The New York Times chose to make it public. Dreier also offers tips to help other journalists use the anonymized data to report on migrant children and labor issues in their states and communities.

Her responses have been lightly edited to match The Journalist’s Resource’s editorial style.

Denise-Marie Ordway: Why did you create this database and how did it help you report out the series?

Hannah Dreier: This was a story that focused on people and on-the-ground reporting, but it started with data. I started out in early 2022 with a question: What happened to the hundreds of thousands of young people who were crossing the southern border by themselves?

I knew from years of immigration reporting that some of these children ended up working industrial jobs. But little was known about the startling scope of child labor throughout the United States, or the industry and governmental failures that have allowed it to thrive.

My first, and largest, hurdle was figuring out how to find children in this hidden workforce. The government provides shelter to children when they arrive, but after releasing them to sponsors, it doesn’t track them further. To find where children were working, I had to develop a new approach to analyzing federal data.

I quickly realized that children released to distant relatives and strangers were the most likely to be put to work. So I filed multiple FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests with the Department of Health and Human Services — and eventually sued them in federal court. I was able to obtain ZIP code-level data showing where children had been released to these nonparent sponsors. I then overlaid this data with U.S. Census population-density data to pinpoint parts of the country with especially high concentrations of children living far from their close relatives.

The resulting database guided two years of reporting across 13 states.

The data pointed to spots I never would have thought of: Flandreau, South Dakota; Parksley, Virginia; Bozeman, Montana. I started visiting these towns for weeks at a time, embedding in schools, and accompanying families to weddings and quinceañeras. I sat in factory parking lots during the midnight shift change and waited outside day labor sites before dawn. I found town after town where migrant child labor was an open secret.

Ordway: What made you decide to make this data public? Should more journalists and news outlets do this?

Dreier: Yes! And I hope more reporters use this data to dig into migrant child labor in America.

After I wrote a Times Insider piece explaining my process for mapping migrant child labor, Congressional staffers, academics, other journalists and even Department of Labor investigators requested access to our database. As part of its commitment to exposing the full scope of child labor, The Times made this data public, along with a detailed map that outlined outcomes for more than 550,000 children over a period of eight years.

We found migrant child labor in all 50 states. It’s clear there’s more to this story than what one journalist or even a team of reporters can report.

Ordway: How do you recommend other journalists use this database?

Dreier: Journalists at different outlets around the country have already picked up on some child labor stories, and this data can help them tell new stories. For local reporters, the database provides a previously unavailable level of detail about migrant children, including where kids are coming from, how long they’re staying in government-run shelters, and what kind of relationships they have with their sponsors (if they’re being released to aunts and uncles, distant cousins, strangers, etc.).

It’s been great to see reporters starting to use the database to fuel their own reporting, including at The Cincinnati Enquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Ordway: What advice would you give other journalists who’d like to create databases for their own reporting projects?

Dreier: Though the heart of this reporting was the stories of the children themselves, I used data to add sweep and bring home to readers just how widespread this problem has become.

We found useful data everywhere. It doesn’t always take a federal lawsuit to shake it loose. We used court records from PACER [the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records system] and state courts, as well as documents from dozens of FOIA requests to the Department of Labor and state labor agencies to hunt down outcomes the government does not track.

We built a database of migrant children killed on the job, including a 15-year-old who fell on his first day roofing and a 14-year-old who was hit by a car while delivering food.

Another database showed how rarely the government prosecuted child labor trafficking cases. I also tracked serious workplace injuries suffered by children, including crushed limbs and seared lungs.

A lot of data is sitting there for the taking, and doesn’t require submitting any requests at all. I’d encourage reporters to spend time on the websites of the agencies they’re reporting on — for me, that was OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], DOL [the Department of Labor], HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services], SEC [the Securities and Exchange Commission], and CBP [Customs and Border Protection].

I also found it helpful to try site searches of these websites (by adding “site:hhs.gov” to Google searches for example), and to add the search term .csv or .xlsx, because some databases are posted to the site but not listed anywhere.

Ordway: When you ask government agencies for data such as this, how do you make sure you receive it in a form that you can easily use for reporting purposes?

Dreier: I always ask FOIA officers to email me records and to send data as a spreadsheet, but government offices often ignore that request.

With this project, some state agencies and police departments would send records only in hard copy or on CDs.

HHS gave us thousands of rows of data in the form of poorly rendered PDFs. We resolved this issue by scanning hundreds of pages of documents, and then using online tools to convert them to searchable text and spreadsheets.

For me, the most important thing is to get the records. From there, it’s almost always possible to find some way to make them useable … even if it ends up being a time-consuming process.

Read the stories

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

As Migrant Children Were Put to Work, U.S. Ignored Warnings

The Kids on the Night Shift

Children Risk Their Lives Building America’s Roofs

They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?

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The U.S. central banking system, the Federal Reserve, is a data-heavy organization. Economists at the bank regularly crunch numbers to inform national decisions, such as setting target interest rates. Meanwhile, economists at the Federal Reserve’s district banks — there are 12 across the country — analyze local and regional data to provide research insights on specialized topics, such as economic inequality.

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book offers a high-level, anecdotal glimpse of current economic sentiment in each of the central bank’s 12 regions. For journalists, it can serve as an extensive tip sheet with insights on local, regional and national story angles.

The Beige Book is valuable for journalists reporting on economic issues, because national and regional economic conditions can change rapidly. The March 2024 edition offers story ideas for reporters covering business as well as those covering elections, education, health care and criminal justice.

The Beige Book was first publicly published in the 1980s with a beige colored cover. Find the archives here.

The book is compiled from reports from Federal Reserve district directors and interviews and surveys of business owners, community groups and economists.

The authors of the book refer to individuals surveyed as “contacts,” and they are quoted anonymously. There’s no particular number of contacts needed to produce the Beige Book, but each release is based on insights from hundreds of contacts culled from surveys and wide-ranging conversations among “a diverse set of sources that can provide accurate and objective information about a broad range of economic activities,” according to the book.

Economists and analysts at district banks seek to cultivate contacts who can give a broad economic view — think the head of a trade group who regularly talks with many company owners — along with contacts representing a variety of industries and company sizes.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests the anecdotes in the Beige Book accurately reflect what’s happening with employment and inflation the U.S. economy. After performing a simple textual analysis of every Beige Book from 2000 to April 2022, those authors find, for example, that mentions of rising prices tend to closely track with official inflation data.

“Of course, the Beige Book — with its emphasis on qualitative and anecdotal information — is written with the belief that those anecdotes provide a deeper understanding of the economy, which simple word counts cannot capture,” write St. Louis Fed senior economist Charles Gascon and research associate Devin Warner in their June 2022 analysis.

The Beige Book published on March 6 includes information gathered during January and February. Across districts, inflation has moderated in recent weeks, but firms overall are increasingly reticent to pass higher transportation and health insurance costs on to customers, “who became increasingly sensitive to price changes.”

In several districts with major metropolitan areas, a spate of commercial real estate loans are coming due this year and over the next few years. Lenders worry mortgage holders, particularly those who borrowed money to buy office buildings, could default because some companies that closed their offices or moved to smaller ones at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need large downtown offices.

Keep reading for quick summaries and story ideas from the latest Beige Book release.

District 1, Boston

Dry January slump

Contacts from staffing agencies reported fewer sign-on perks for new hires and fewer retention bonuses for existing employees “as well as a trend away from remote work arrangements.” These could indicate that bargaining power is shifting from workers, who have benefitted in recent months from a tight labor market, to employers.

The office lease market is “expected to stay tepid,” and there is “ongoing uncertainty over the fate of office loans maturing in 2024.” In other words, commercial office mortgage lenders with maturing loans will expect to be paid back this year, or have borrowers refinance at higher rates. Are office owners going to meet those obligations, considering the relative dearth of leases?

According to other recent research from the Boston Fed, big banks are expected to feel more pain than small banks from mortgage defaults linked to expiring leases in central business districts.

Story idea: How does “Dry January” affect food and beverage sales in your area? Dry January is an annual public health initiative, started in the United Kingdom, in which people take a monthlong holiday from alcohol. One restaurant industry contact from Massachusetts blamed Dry January and New Year’s resolutions for “an exceptionally weak January.” Later this year, reach out to restaurants and bars to ask how they are gearing up to weather Dry January 2025. Do bars plan to expand their suite of non-alcoholic libations? Are they going to hold more events, like trivia nights or live music, to get customers through their doors?

District 1 covers Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and most of Connecticut.

District 2, New York

‘Loss prevention measures’

Wages in District 2 grew at a “moderate pace” while statewide minimum wage increases — including a jump from $15 to $16 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester at the start of the year — “caused some business to raise pay more substantially for some employees.”

Meanwhile, input prices — the costs of materials used to make products — also “picked up at a moderate pace.” Specifically, contacts “noted outsized increases in the prices of raw materials such as cocoa, copper, plastic and textiles amid ongoing sharp increases in insurance and freight costs.” This matters because higher input prices often result in higher consumer prices, if a firm thinks moderately higher prices won’t dissuade buyers.

As in District 1 hubs, New York City is facing a spate of office mortgages coming due in 2024, with “financial strain” in the office leasing sector “foreshadowing further increases in defaults in the coming year.” Outside of the city, however, office markets “remained more resilient” due to better balance between supply and demand.

Story idea: Public safety is a concern among business owners and community leaders in District 2, particularly given “a rise in hate crimes and ongoing high rates of retail theft,” which have “reduced the sense of security in public spaces, such as on public transit and in stores.” Some retail owners have tried to deter theft and now face “increased costs due to loss prevention measures.” What specific measures have local business taken? How are chain stores addressing loss prevention differently from mom-and-pop stores? How do longstanding businesses perceive current crime and theft levels compared with higher crime eras during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in New York City? For example, crime rates for violent crimes, including murder and rape, and other serious crimes, such as grand larceny, are down 72% over the past three decades, according to data from the New York City Police Department. Certain types of violent crime have risen, however. Felony assault, for example, is up 75% compared with 14 years ago in New York City. There is a story to explore about which crimes are being committed at higher rates, when the increase began and how business owners predict crime levels will affect their economic prospects over the months ahead. (Note that police departments occasionally change their definitions of crime categories, which can affect historical comparisons.)

District 2 covers New York, western Connecticut, northern New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

District 3, Philadelphia

Moving out of the moving business

While supply chain issues among contacts “large and small” were “no longer a concern” in District 3, many contacts are still worried about labor shortages, along with “payment problems among low-income households.” Despite supply chain problems being largely abated, one large manufacturer “noted that shipping disruptions in the Red Sea and the Panama Canal would likely add to costs.”

Fully electric vehicles were unpopular in District 3, “selling slowly and piling up on dealer lots,” although “other models were selling well.” New car sales were also lower after seasonal adjustments, with auto buyers generally hampered by high vehicle prices and high interest rates.

Meanwhile, leisure travel was down across the district, “hurt by poor skiing conditions.” Residential real estate inventory remains “extremely low” and existing home sales fell from levels that were also “extremely low.” Construction activity, generally, also slowed.

Story idea: Sometimes downstream effects are as interesting as upstream ones. With high interest rates and high costs, home sales are “weak” in District 3. Those typically affected by weak home sales would include real estate brokers, buyers, sellers and builders. One overlooked group? Movers. One contact that does household moves reported that slow home sales had led to the shuttering of businesses in that industry, with conditions being “the worst they have ever been in my career, which dates back to 1968.” See if a moving company will let you shadow their drivers and operational employees for a day or two — there could be an interesting narrative to tell about the downstream effects of an upstream problem.

District 3 covers most of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware.

District 4, Cleveland

Trained gig workers

In contrast to other districts, commercial construction firms in District 4 have been “increasing staffing levels to ramp up for new capital projects,” according to contacts in the industry, who report “strong demand for manufacturing space.”

In the restaurant business, some contacts “noted a recent uptick in the cost of chicken, beef and produce.” For now, restaurants seem be absorbing those costs rather than passing them onto guests, according to two contacts.

As in District 3, auto dealers in District 4 have seen sales suffer due to “high interest rates and high vehicle prices,” but one contact said there were more new vehicles available to sell, with new vehicle supply better than it had been in recent months. Some auto dealers were hopeful that spring would bring new customers, but most were not optimistic about improved sales in the coming months.

Story idea: Why are younger workers taking gig jobs, even after completing training for employment in other fields? That’s the situation in District 4, according to one workforce development contact. Check out this recent report, “The Gig Workforce isn’t just Delivering Dinner,” from Cuyahoga Community College and Team NEO, an economic development organization, to understand the types of jobs that make up gig work and the educational investments more likely to lead people into gig work. In Greater Cleveland, for example, about one-in-three gig workers come out of liberal arts and sciences programs while about one in ten come from nursing or business administration programs. The report is also a good place to start building a source list, such as Team NEO CEO Bill Koehler.

District 4 covers Ohio, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia.

District 5, Richmond

Election economics

How’s the labor market in District 5? Depends on who you ask. An outdoor goods retailer said they were having a hard time finding workers, but added that’s not abnormal in retail. Meanwhile, one advertising firm “reported a complete [180-degree turn] from last year, and candidates are finding them now and not the other way around.” Finally, an engraver and an aluminum welder reported trouble finding qualified workers. The engraver finally found good help after a lengthy search, “which felt like finding a needle in the haystack.”

Shipping contacts reported more consumer goods coming through ports, and overall demand for water freight “was good this period despite disruptions in the Panama and Suez canals impacting schedules.” Spot rates were up quite a bit — those are one-time shipping rates to move a volume of goods without a longer-term contract — because “carriers were trying to offset higher costs associated with the longer transit times.”

Story idea: One “design firm” — no further details given — expected less demand for the coming year because bigger companies that usually solicit their services “become more conservative with their budgets” during election years “until the election is decided.” There is a potentially interesting explainer-style business-to-business narrative about the decisions big firms make affecting small companies that do contract work for them. Start by looking into the firms that employ large numbers of people — in the Richmond area, this includes CarMax, Altria Group and Dominion Energy. Ask whether they are cutting back on certain services this election year due to uncertainty over who will be president in 2025, along with outcomes of local races. From there, interview principals at smaller companies that could see decreased revenue to find out how they are planning to make it through 2024. If workers who have been laid off due to cutbacks are willing to talk, then so much the better — from a storytelling perspective.

District 5 covers Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, most of West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

District 6, Atlanta

Location, location, location

The end of household financial help that began during the pandemic, such as extended child tax and SNAP benefits, “continued to weigh heavily on many households,” with housing costs in particular representing “an acute burden for both consumers and providers of affordable housing.”

Many consumers remain “price conscious,” as they have been in other recent Beige Books, with retailers describing it as “an ongoing normalization of consumer behaviors.” But leisure business has been robust, with cruise lines in South Florida reporting “strong demand,” along with “a solid lineup of events for the second quarter” in New Orleans, such as conferences and festivals.

Story idea: District 6 home sales “in most major markets ended the year well below seasonal norms and remained significantly behind pre-pandemic levels.” Existing homes are hard to come by, particularly those owned by people who had locked in low mortgage rates prior to recent Federal Reserve hikes. This means demand for new homes is high, but home builders “indicated higher lot costs as a significant impediment moving forward.” Are lot prices in your coverage area much higher now than in recent years, even after accounting for regular inflation? Experts at realtor.com can help you gather data to assess the current state and recent history of lot prices.

District 6 covers Alabama, Florida, Georgia, eastern Tennessee, southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi.

District 7, Chicago

Pandemic business struggles

A cold January hurt consumer sales in District 7, and a more temperate February “was not enough to offset the earlier decline.” Firms in general were willing to invest in their physical assets, “with contacts noting renovations or expansions of existing structures.” Keep in mind that capital expenditures represent a tangible investment in a company’s future and are often a sign that business owners are optimistic about the future.

But high interest rates deterred some firms from outlaying capital expenditures. Inventories were “comfortable” for many retailers, meaning those contacts think they have roughly an appropriate amount of goods to sell to meet demand.

Prices for corn, wheat and soybeans were down, though “the outlook for livestock producers improved.” Dairy farmers benefitted from lower feed prices in recent weeks, but profit margins “remained tight” amid higher labor costs.

Story idea: Organizations that support small business development reported that firms seeking help tended to be established, rather than start-ups. In particular, businesses that were founded during the pandemic “struggled with sustainability.” Take a look at which businesses were founded in your coverage area during the pandemic. Is there something specific about how they serve customers — entirely online, for example — that is making it difficult to adjust to the post-pandemic economy?

District 7 includes Iowa, most of Indiana, northern Illinois, southern and central Michigan and southern Wisconsin.

District 8, St. Louis

Pass the buck

Similar to District 3, an auto dealer in District 8 reports having to reset expectations on electric vehicle sales due to a lack of buyer interest. General retailers in downtown Louisville chalk up declining sales to “continued sluggish foot traffic.” Restaurants in St. Louis and Louisville likewise saw sluggish sales, “which they attributed to continued price increases.”

Real estate contacts in Arkansas and Tennessee reported strength in the lower end of the housing market, while the higher end was doing better in Mississippi and southern Indiana. As is the case across the country, businesses that want office leases can get them. Problem is, they don’t seem to want them. “In Louisville, two large tenants announced plans to vacate their downtown offices.”

But on the rosier side of commercial real estate, a contact in Memphis “reported that demand for retail space remains strong.”

Story idea: A contact in the District 8 theater industry “reported increasing costs and difficulty in determining if and how to pass those increases on to patrons.” Consumer prices rise or fall in relation to elasticity of demand, which simply refers to whether consumers still buy something when its price goes up. How do small businesses running on a shoestring — say, a theater — make practical decisions, like whether to eat higher costs or pass them onto consumers? What data do they use to inform price changes? How good is that information? What data do they wish they had but don’t? Or do they use experience and intuition as a proxy for good data?

District 8 includes Arkansas, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, western Kentucky, northern Mississippi, central and eastern Missouri and western Tennessee.

District 9, Minneapolis

Localizing climate change

Most workers looking for jobs in District 9 were confident they would find one within three months. Recent hires who had weathered a spell of unemployment found jobs primarily in health care, education and manufacturing. Still, food costs during the day are eating into some workers’ budgets, with one worker lamenting that “I wish my $20 [sandwich] lunch went back to [costing] $10. It instead keeps going up.”

Unseasonable warmth hampered winter sports ventures, with ski hills in Montana and Michigan shuttering “due to lack of snow.” There was good underlying demand for winter leisure, though, with hotel bookings “20% higher to start the year,” according to one contact in the upper peninsula of Michigan, who added that “most guests cancel due to lack of snow. We are now showing a 25% decline. This is having a devastating effect on all local businesses.” Still, hope springs eternal for better tourism revenues during the coming season.

Story idea: Per the unseasonable warmth, there is an opportunity for journalists to localize the effects of climate change. While particular weather and climate patterns are often not attributable solely to climate change, overall warming across the planet is. Who are the workers affected by ski hill and other seasonal closures? Are they younger, older, experienced, first-timers, or all of the above? Where else do they turn for seasonal work? Have such closures become more frequent in recent years?

District 9 includes Minnesota, Montana, the Dakotas, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin.

District 10, Kansas City

Rising household medical debt

The labor market remained tight in District 10, though many firms “also indicated the quality of applicants and recent hires improved recently.” Firms are also focusing on retraining existing workers — likewise, “wage increases were focused primarily on workers who expanded their capabilities, responsibilities and productivity.”

Prices were up “moderately” for goods and services, along with the costs of dining out and hotel rooms. “Amid the rising price sensitivity of consumers, several contacts indicated their emphasis on protecting price margins over coming months.”

There have been “very few property transactions” recently in commercial real estate, which makes it harder to estimate the value of properties that are for sale. Recent appraisals have been met with “skepticism” from buyers “not wanting to be in a position of trying to ‘catch a falling knife’ early in a [commercial real estate] downturn.”

Story idea: Households with low incomes had trouble accessing credit, and they also experienced increasing defaults on credit cards and payday loans. Meanwhile, defaults on medical debt also rose. While medical debt has been covered extensively by national news outlets, reporters covering District 10 regions can localize the issue. Recent consolidation of health systems in Kansas City and St. Louis “could mean bigger medical bills,” according to recent reporting from Spectrum News. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s 2022 report, “Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households,” the most recent available, finds roughly one-third of adults would not be able to pay for a $400 emergency event. What challenges do people face in understanding and using financial assistance programs offered by health systems and clinics?

District 10 includes Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, western Missouri and northern New Mexico.

District 11, Dallas

Office leasing twist

Cold winter weather slowed output at oil refineries along the Gulf Coast, in North Dakota and other areas of the Midwest, resulting in “modest upward pressure on fuel prices.” Though oilfield output in District 11 “held steady,” looking ahead “contacts expect U.S. oil production growth to slow notably this year.”

Capacity issues due to drought in the Panama Canal region were “impacting container volumes at Gulf Coast ports.” But drought problems in Texas improved. “Recent rainfall improved pasture conditions, refilled ponds and boosted crop prospects.” Some farmers turned toward cotton and away from grain due to higher prices for the textile crop.

Story idea: As in other districts with major metropolitan hubs, office leasing “remained weak,” with “elevated” vacancies and “widespread” concessions. Also, in bit of a narrative twist, some prospective tenants are assessing the credit of their potential landlords instead of the other way around. Staff at the North Texas Commercial Association of Realtors and The Real Estate Council may be willing to answer questions about how prevalent this practice is, along with other questions on the state of the commercial real estate market in District 11.

District 11 includes Texas, northern Louisiana and southern New Mexico.

District 12, San Francisco

Double-dip jobs

The local economic boost from Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas “exceeded expectations” and was “in line with that of the Formula 1 race held in the city last November.” But leisure and hospitality business abated across most of District 12 “due to expected seasonal fluctuations.”

Contacts in the health and agriculture sectors turned to automation and other “emerging technology solutions” to “boost productivity and improve efficiency.”

Wages were up a bit across District 12, in line with inflation. To retain workers in a tight labor market, “some employers fully absorbed recent increases in health insurance premiums and continued to offer hybrid or fully remote work.”

Story idea: Are people seeking remote work so they can get second jobs? One contact in Nevada reported “that employees preferred remote work because it allowed them to more easily take a second job,” but the report does not indicate the industry those employees work in. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last updated its state-by-state report on multiple jobholders nearly a decade ago. But experts at the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center may be able to provide recent data, insight on whether this is a regional trend and help journalists find employees who work remotely and have second jobs.

District 12 includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The post Story ideas from the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book: March 2024 appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

We updated this tip sheet on private school choice, originally published Feb. 7, 2024, to provide more recent data on U.S. students participating in these programs as well as additional historical context.

About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars.

It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is particularly important as more states consider starting these programs and lawmakers in states that have them push to expand.

How can journalists strengthen their coverage? We put this question to seven university professors who study private school vouchers and other private school choice programs. Here’s their advice:

1. Explain how the various private school choice programs differ.

In the U.S., the three most common private school choice programs are tuition vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, or ESAs. Journalists often refer to them all as “voucher” programs, but there are key differences.

“ESAs are radically different from school vouchers,” Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, wrote to The Journalist’s Resource.

In our roundup of research on private school choice, we briefly explain these three programs:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.

• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.

• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

2. Find out how families decide whether to participate in private school choice programs.

Vanderbilt University researcher Claire Smrekar urges journalists to ask families how they decide whether to participate in these programs and to ask school officials what kinds of information they provide.

Policymakers and school officials often assume incorrectly that parents and guardians have access to the same information, says Smrekar, an associate professor of public policy and education who’s also editor of the Peabody Journal of Education. But studies consistently show that lower-income families and parents with lower levels of formal education generally do not receive or seek out the same information that higher-income families and parents with college degrees do, she adds.

Parents and guardians who aren’t familiar with education jargon or certain terms might not fully understand what school officials convey about private school choice programs in person or in writing. The same is true for parents who don’t speak English or aren’t fluent.

The method of communication matters, too, Smrekar points out. School officials often use email and social media to share information. That’s a problem for families who don’t have internet service or use the same social media platforms. 

“This is not an indictment of or finding fault with parents,” she says. “It’s a problem with the assumption that all families have access to high levels of information.”  

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, says journalists should pay attention to enrollment patterns. Students aren’t leaving their public schools in droves. A lot of the kids using public money to pay for a private K-12 education were already enrolled in private schools, he notes.

In Iowa, for example, state officials reported in July that 40% of students approved for education savings accounts were public school students planning to transfer to private schools and 60% were students already enrolled in private schools, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

In Florida, 84,505 students receiving private school vouchers were already enrolled in private school, Politico reports. And 22,294 children started kindergarten at private schools using tuition vouchers. Meanwhile, 16,096 kids — 13% of all voucher recipients — transferred from public to private schools.

3. Scrutinize private schools.

Researchers we interviewed stressed the need for more in-depth reporting on private schools in states that have introduced school choice programs and states where lawmakers are considering it.

Questions they say journalists should answer in their news coverage:

• What assumptions are being made about the quality and number of private schools willing to participate in these programs?
• What’s the history and track record of private schools that participate in these programs in your state or other states?
• What’s the capacity of private schools in your community and state?
• What are the types and locations of private schools that have the most room available for new students?
• Are the highest quality private schools willing to participate? If so, are they also willing — and able — to expand to accommodate students using vouchers, tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts?
• What rules or other factors could deter the highest quality private schools from participating?
• If a private school has limited seats available, which types of students are most likely to be admitted?
• Do any private schools in your state or community bar certain types of students from enrolling — for example, pregnant students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities or students who don’t speak English?
• If a student’s voucher, tax-credit scholarship or education savings account doesn’t cover the full tuition amount, which schools will help students cover the remainder? How?

4. Note that using public money to pay for private education is not a recent development.

State and local governments have funded private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities for generations. Rural communities in New England started offering “town tuitioning” to school children after the Civil War, starting with Vermont in 1869 and Maine in 1873.

In these communities, local governments give families money to pay for private school because they don’t operate public schools that serve all grades. Kids who cannot go to public school in these towns have the option of enrolling in a public or private school in another location. As of February 2023, 45 Vermont communities offered this option, the Valley News in New Hampshire reports. This school year, these towns are paying $18,266 in tuition, on average, for each student in grades 7 to 12 and $16,756, on average, per child in the lower grades, according to the Vermont Agency of Education.

In parts of the U.S. South in the 1950s and 1960s, governments paid for white students to attend private schools so they could avoid learning alongside Black students in public schools. “Securing public funding for all-white private schools was the go-to solution in the face of integration mandates,” researchers Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy Jon Nelson wrote in November in the Daily Beast.

In 1989, Wisconsin enacted the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which provided private school tuition vouchers to lower-income children in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. The program has been expanded multiple times over the years. Florida launched the first statewide voucher program in 1999, giving students in failing public schools the option of transferring to private schools.

This year, an estimated 836,447 students across more than 20 states will receive a projected $6.2 billion through private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, according to a recent report from EdChoice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Almost one-third of those students are using vouchers averaging $8,566 to attend private schools.

State governments have long provided funding for private colleges and universities as well. As a comparison, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion in fiscal year 2022 — $297 million to help them with operating costs and $2.5 billion to help students pay for tuition and other education-related expenses, according to a report the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association released last year.

5. Push back on claims made by advocates on both sides of the issue.

“More journalists should challenge the slogans and talking points of policy advocates on both sides of the school choice debate,” Wolf wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “For example, if a [school] choice supporter declares ‘school choice is a lifeline for needy students,’ ask them: ‘What proportion of students who switch from public to private schools clearly benefit from the change?’ [and] ‘What proportion leave the private school within two years and just end up bouncing around from school to school with no stability?’

Wolf also suggested journalists push back on claims from school choice critics who declare, for example, that private school vouchers will destroy public schools.

“Ask them: ‘Why are public schools so fragile that they can only endure if students have no other option?’ [and] ‘Where has school choice destroyed the public-school sector? Give me an example,’” he added.

Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, advised journalists to press supporters of private school choice to explain their reasons why.

“The slogan we hear is that choice is good in and of itself,” Jabbar wrote to The Journalist’s Resource. “I’d be curious to see if leaders advancing this are also concerned about school quality or accountability or student outcomes — or if their main goal is simply to give families more choices, even if they end up selecting schools that are worse for their children’s academic outcomes. In other words, what are the main priorities driving these policies? It seems important to be transparent about the aims so that we can then assess the evidence associated with those goals/aims.”

Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, suggests journalists ask about potential learning loss. How would parents and guardians react if their children’s standardized test scores drop after enrolling in private school? How much of a decline is acceptable? Which should be policymakers’ priority: Getting the biggest positive impact they can for taxpayer dollars or giving families the ability to choose for themselves the type of education they want for their kids?

6. Familiarize yourself with the research on private school choice.

Academic journals are continually publishing new studies on private school choice. It’s critical for journalists covering the topic to stay up to date and incorporate new findings into their stories.

“The research has shifted — we’re seeing a different story from the research than we were 10 years ago,” Lubienski says.

While studies in the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate U.S. students in these programs perform as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers, more recent research finds private school choice students do about the same or worse. In Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia, test scores fell after public school students transferred to private schools, according to papers published or released in 2016 and 2018.

Cowen says the challenges associated with scaling up these programs are reflected in the newer studies.

“There are not enough good private schools to take these children,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

The Journalist’s Resource has gathered and summarized several peer-reviewed papers on private school choice. They are among the most recent and offer valuable insights into how these programs affect student achievement in the U.S., Chile, Colombia, Denmark, India and other countries.

For help spotting problematic research, check out our tip sheet, “How to Gauge the Quality of a Research Study: 13 Questions Journalists Should Ask.”

Also, because education researchers sometimes report their findings in terms of standard deviations instead of more common units of measurement such as points or rates, you might find this short explainer helpful: “What’s Standard Deviation? 4 Things Journalists Need to Know.”

7. Report on long-term trends in test scores and other indicators of progress.

M. Danish Shakeel, who co-edited the book Educating Believers: Religion and School Choice, says it’s important that journalists look at how individual private school choice programs perform over time. Academic studies often provide a snapshot of a program over the span of several months or a few years.

In addition to standardized test scores, journalists should examine other indicators of student achievement such as civic engagement, college graduation rates and the development of non-cognitive skills, including problem solving and communication skills, says Shakeel, a professor at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom and director of the E.G. West Centre for Education Policy there.

It’s also important that journalists know that families have many reasons for seeking a private school education. Not all parents who care deeply about their children’s academic progress consider large spikes in test scores the main priority, Shakeel adds.

Some families prefer religious instruction or that their children learn in a faith-based environment, neither of which is available in American public schools. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that religious schools cannot be excluded from government programs that help parents and guardians pay private school tuition.

Some families believe it’s just as important to instill morals and values in children as it is to teach them reading and math. Shakeel recommends journalists look at how students’ lives, as a whole, have changed since they began participating in private school choice programs.

“Start asking questions on outcomes that are not typically discussed,” he says. “[Academic] outcomes are important, but those things that are important to the family get missed in the news reports.”

Some questions to ask families:

• What have their children’s interactions with teachers and classmates been like at their private school? If their kids transferred from a public school, how has their learning experience changed?
• Have families’ attitudes about education or schools changed?
• Do parents and guardians feel supported by teachers and staff at the private school?
• How have their parenting styles changed since their children started private school?
• Has the family or child become more religious, compassionate or civic-minded?
• How has the child’s behavior at home and in the community changed?
• How satisfied are parents and guardians with their children’s education?

The post 7 tips for improving news coverage of private school choice appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Last year, at least 31 states considered legislation to create or expand programs that use public money to help parents pay for a private, K-12 education, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2024, conservative leaders and political candidates — including the two Republicans vying for the U.S. presidency — are pushing to make private school vouchers and other forms of tuition assistance even more widely available.

Local governments in the U.S. have, on a limited basis, provided funding for their residents to attend private schools since the mid-1800s, starting with rural communities in Maine and Vermont. The practice has grown increasingly common in recent decades, and even more common the past few years. Florida introduced the first statewide private school voucher program in 1999, offering children in the lowest performing public schools the option of transferring to a private school.

A total of 310,770 students in 16 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico used vouchers in 2023, according to a recent report from EdChoice. a nonprofit organization that advocates for school choice. Another 312,471 students in 21 states used tax-credit scholarships, which are similar to vouchers, to attend private school, EdChoice reports.

Private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts

Three of the most common programs governments implement to help families pay for private school are private school vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts. Many politicians, journalists and others refer to all three as vouchers. But there are key differences:

• Private school vouchers are public funds that generally cover all or a portion of private school tuition. Families typically do not receive this money, however. Program administrators tend to send it to the private schools. In a landmark ruling in 1998, the Wisconsin Supreme Court found that allowing religious schools to participate in the state’s voucher program did not violate the state or federal constitution, partly because of the way funds were distributed. Although the state sent voucher checks to participating private schools, it required parents and guardians to “restrictively endorse” the checks to the schools.
• Tax-credit scholarships also cover all or part of a student’s tuition bill. This money also tends to go to directly to the private schools. A primary difference between these two programs: While government agencies take money from their own coffers to offer vouchers, they fund tax-credit scholarships indirectly. They give businesses and other taxpayers tax credits in exchange for donating money needed to provide scholarships.
• Education savings accounts contain public funds that students can spend on a variety of education-related items and services. Allowable expenses frequently include private school tuition, online courses, tutoring, standardized testing fees and homeschooling materials. In Arizona, students also can use ESA dollars to buy laptops, telescopes, gym memberships, desks and tickets to zoos, museums and musicals. However, during the 2022-23 school year, 66% of Arizona’s ESA money went to tuition and fees at private schools, with the largest share going to schools created to serve students with disabilities, according to an analysis from KNXV-TV Channel 15.

States offering ESAs usually call them scholarships. Florida and Arizona, for example, named their ESAs “empowerment” scholarships.

Academic researchers, meanwhile, often refer to these three programs, as a group, as “private school choice” programs. Some call them “voucher and voucher-like” programs.

Another important detail: In recent decades, private school choice programs in the U.S. have been largely restricted to certain student groups, including low- and middle-income youth, children in foster care, kids with disabilities and students attending poor performing public schools. Some states have made their programs “universal,” meaning all students within their boundaries can participate.

Arizona, in 2022, became the first state to introduce a universal education savings account program. As of November 2023, a total of eight states had enacted private school choice programs that are universal or nearly universal, Politico reports.

An extraordinarily divisive topic

In the coming months, journalists across the country will be reporting on legislative efforts to create or change private school choice programs. In many communities, journalists will need to cover new legislation as they also cover the challenges government officials will likely face implementing the policies lawmakers approved last year or in prior years.

Among the new proposals:

• A Republican legislator in Kentucky filed a bill Jan. 26 aimed at amending her state’s constitution to allow public funding to be spent on private education.
• Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced plans to introduce a bill during this year’s legislative session that would dramatically increase the number of students eligible for one of his state’s education savings accounts, which he has named Education Freedom Scholarships. Lee, a Republican, wants to open the program to all students statewide during the 2025-26 school year.
• Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in New Mexico announced they plan to establish a tax-credit scholarship that would help lower-income students there afford private school, according to the nonprofit news outlet, Source New Mexico.
• Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, wants to overhaul — and shrink — school choice programs in that state, the Associated Press reports.

In the U.S., lawmakers’ support for or opposition to private school choice programs tends to follow political party lines. Conservative and conservative-leaning legislators often support programs that offer parents more control over where and how their children will be educated. Liberal and liberal-leaning legislators often oppose these programs because of concerns about program accountability, drops in test scores in some states, and using public money to support private schools, religious instruction, wealthy students and homeschooling families.

Researchers who study private school choice also are divided, in their opinions and their interpretations of what studies show, making it even tougher for journalists to distill research findings for the public.

Last year, Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, wrote essays explaining his opposition to vouchers for Time magazine and the Brookings Institution last year.

He advises journalists to read studies of private school choice programs operating in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and the District of Columbia. In his Time piece, he links to four papers released or published in 2016 or 2018 — each examining one of those locations.

“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record — between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss,” he writes in Time in April 2023. “That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”

Patrick J. Wolf, a professor of education policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas, has spoken out in favor of private school choice. He recommends journalists rely most heavily on the most rigorous studies to help them explain the impacts of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Wolf also stresses the importance of journalists checking the quality of the studies that politicians, government officials, advocates, critics and others cite.

The Journalist’s Resource steers journalists toward research that has undergone peer review, an evaluation process performed by independent experts that is designed for quality control. We also encourage journalists to seek out randomized, controlled trials and meta-analyses, when possible.

A randomized, controlled trial, a method of studying the effect of a program or intervention, is widely considered the gold standard in research. A meta-analysis, also one of the most reliable forms of research, is a systematic study of the numerical data collected from a group of studies on the same topic.

When it comes to complicated, politicized topics like school choice, though, journalists should cautiously vet findings even from peer-reviewed studies using these research methods.

Both Cowen and Wolf created short documents to present the research to date in simple terms. We got permission to share Cowen’s “Quick Hits of Voucher Research” and Wolf’s “Summary of Research Findings Regarding the Effects of Private School Choice Programs.”

A November 2022 policy brief coauthored by Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy who directs Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, also examines private school choice research. In it, Lubienski warns against evaluating a program by simply comparing the number of studies that show benefits against the number of studies that shows harms.

Such an assessment does not take into account differences in study quality or size or the magnitude of the impacts that were found.

“Such simplistic representations of the research evidence obscure important factors in understanding the effectiveness and potential of voucher programs,” Lubienski and doctoral student Yusuf Canbolat write in the policy brief.

Research to help journalists report on private school choice

We recommend familiarizing yourself with the breadth of academic research on this topic. It’s important to have a basic understanding of how private school choice programs work and how they affect students — those using public funds for private school as well as their peers who remain in neighboring public schools.

To help you get started, we’ve gathered and summarized a sampling of studies of vouchers and voucher-like programs. These four peer-reviewed papers are not meant to be representative of all the research to date. But they are among the most recent and offer insights into how these initiatives impact student achievement in various countries, including the U.S., Canada, Chile, India, New Zealand and Sweden.  

We included two meta-analyses, both of which analyze more than a decade of numerical data to provide a broad overview of the effects of vouchers and voucher-like programs.

Together, these four papers suggest:

• Studies from the 1990s and early 2000s generally indicate that U.S. students participating in these programs do as well or better on standardized tests than their public school peers. But studies released or published after around 2015 show a shift in performance. They indicate program participants do about the same or worse — in some cases, student scores have dropped considerably.
• When researchers looked at student achievement in the U.S., India and Colombia, they found that kids who participate in these programs, as a whole, earn higher test scores as they progress through private school. But the change is driven largely by Indian and Colombian students. The researchers note this might be due to large differences in the quality of education provided by public and private schools in developing countries.
• U.S. public school students earn slightly higher test scores in communities where private school vouchers and similar tuition assistance programs are available. Researchers explain that this appears to be a response to competition from area private schools. They also note the increase is very small.
• There’s evidence that high school graduation rates are higher among private school choice students in the U.S.

———————-

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students
David N. Figlio, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Krzysztof Karbownik. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023.

The study: Researchers look at how the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program affected public schools in the first 15 years after it was launched. They examine data from the Florida Department of Education and Florida Department of Health to better understand how public school students fared when tens of thousands of their peers left public schools to attend private schools using vouchers from 2002-03 to 2017-18.

This paper analyzes changes in standardized test scores, absenteeism and suspension rates among public school students in grades 3 to 8. It also compares public schools in terms of the amount of competition they faced from private schools even before voucher programs began. Researchers created a “Competitive Pressure Index” for public schools, based on factors such as the proximity and number of private schools operating in the same area and the religiosity of the surrounding community.

The findings: As the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program grew during its first 15 years, public school students in grades 3 to 8, as a whole, earned slightly higher test scores and missed fewer days of class. The impact was strongest at public schools that faced competition from private schools in 2000, the year before the voucher program was created.

The authors write: “We find that as public schools are more exposed to private school choice, their students experience increasing benefits as the program matures,” the researchers conclude. “We find that the public school students most positively affected by increased exposure to private school choice are comparatively low-socioeconomic status (SES) students (those with lower family incomes and lower maternal education levels).”

The Competitive Effects of School Choice on Student Achievement: A Systematic Review
Huriya Jabbar; et al. Educational Policy, March 2022.

The study: Researchers analyzed 92 studies published from 1992 to 2015 to determine whether competition generated by school choice programs reduces or improves student achievement. All the studies examined focus on school choice programs in the U.S.

The findings: When a private school choice program launches and public schools must compete for students, student scores on standardized exams rise very slightly for students who leave their public schools to attend private schools and for their peers who stay behind.

The results indicate that competition created by private school choice programs has a more positive impact on student achievement than the competition created by charter schools. However, the changes are so small they are, for practical purposes, negligible, lead author Huriya Kanwal Jabbar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Southern California, wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

In the authors’ words: “A key argument for school choice made by policymakers and advocates is that school choice has the potential to benefit historically disadvantaged students in particular, due to its ability to break up strong links between poor neighborhoods and underfunded local schools. We tested this relationship, and we found that our measure of poverty, the percentage of students eligible for [free or reduced-price school meals], did not moderate the effects of competition. However, we found some evidence that the sample percentage of minority students was a significant moderator, suggesting that school competition may have a larger influence on student achievement for minority students. This is consistent with advocates’ claims that choice may improve educational opportunities for marginalized students in particular, not just for those who choose, but also for those ‘left behind’ in traditional public schools.”

The Participant Effects of Private School Vouchers Around the Globe: A Meta-Analytic and Systematic Review
M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin P. Anderson and Patrick J. Wolf. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, April 2021.

The study: Researchers examined 21 studies of voucher and voucher-like programs in the U.S., India and Colombia to evaluate how well students who use vouchers performed on standardized tests. This paper is the first meta-analysis of evidence collected from randomized, controlled trials of voucher programs conducted in multiple countries, the researchers write.

The 21 studies, dated from 1998 to 2018, represent a total of 11 voucher programs serving low-income students in these locations: Toledo, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Washington D.C.; the state of Louisiana; Delhi, India; Andhra Pradesh, India; and Bogota, Colombia.

The findings: When researchers focused on the most recent year of data provided by each study, they found that the 11 voucher programs, overall, had a “generally modest positive” effect on test scores in those locations. Voucher programs in India and Colombia had a larger impact than programs in the U.S. “The results indicate that voucher programs tend to moderately increase test scores, particularly in developing countries with a large private-public school quality gap,” the researchers write.

In the authors’ words: “Many of the programs included here are still relatively small scale,” they write. “More experimental work should take place on larger programs in order to understand whether or not the achievement benefits of private school vouchers replicate at scale.”

School Vouchers: A Survey of the Economics Literature
Dennis Epple, Richard E. Romano and Miguel Urquiola. Journal of Economic Literature, June 2017.

The study: Researchers examine more than two decades of economic research on private school vouchers in the U.S., Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, India, New Zealand and Sweden to answer five key questions, including “What effects do vouchers have on the students who use them?” The papers they analyzed span from 1990 to 2014.

The findings: The researchers determined that the answers to their questions vary depending on “the characteristics of the program analyzed and the context into which it is introduced.” When they looked specifically at how vouchers affect the academic achievement of U.S. students who use them, they discovered that the evidence, overall, “finds not very robust effects on test scores” and that the effects are “most frequently nonexistent.”

The researchers note, however, that three studies of private school choice programs in Louisiana and Ohio, published in 2015 and 2016, show large declines in test scores. They point out that the data does indicate an uptick in high school graduation rates among voucher users in the U.S., and Black students in particular.

In the authors’ words: “Vouchers have been neither the rousing success imagined by proponents nor the abject failure predicted by opponents,” they write. “While the evidence does not make a case for wholesale adoption of vouchers, recent theoretical and empirical results suggest a need for — and reasons for cautious optimism about — potential gains from improving voucher design.”

Other resources

• The Education Commission of the States provides a state-by-state look at private school choice policies plus a 50-state comparison summary.
• The EdChoice Dashboard provides detailed information about U.S. school choice programs, including the number of students participating in each program.
• The U.S. Government Accountability Office has compiled several lengthy reports on private school vouchers and other school choice programs. A report released in November 2017 finds that “private school choice programs inconsistently provide information on changes in rights and protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) when parents move a child with a disability from public to private school.” An October 2019 report looks at the characteristics of the 22 tax-credit scholarship programs operating in 17 states at that time.
• For journalists interested in comparing funding levels, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association provides data on state funding for private colleges and universities. In fiscal year 2022, state governments gave private higher education institutions a total of $2.8 billion — $297 million to help with operating costs and $2.5 billion in student financial aid, the organization reports.
• Gallup, an analytics firm that has tracked Americans’ satisfaction with public schools annually since 1999, reports that 63% of the people it surveyed in August 2023 were somewhat or completely dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s K-12 education. The sentiment among parents was a bit better — 59% were somewhat or completely dissatisfied.

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Pop quiz: Which of these headlines appeared atop a real news story?

(A) Zelenskyy pleads to US Congress: ‘We need you right now’

(B) Biden signed bill to mandate climate change curriculum in all K-8 classrooms

If you answered A, you’re correct — and not alone.

About 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. can discern real political news headlines from fake ones, finds a new paper, “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News,” forthcoming in the American Economic Review.

The findings are based on a dozen quizzes completed by a total of nearly 8,000 participants representative of the national population, conducted by Charles Angelucci, an assistant professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Andrea Prat, an economics professor at Columbia University, from June 2019 to March 2022.

Angelucci and Prat find participants selected the real headlines 75% of the time, on average. While participants overall were much more likely than not to pick the true headline, demographic factors, not partisanship, were a stronger predictor of avoiding fake news, according to a subsequent statistical analysis the authors conducted. For example, younger, less educated people are less likely to pick true headlines, compared with those who are older and have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

And if you answered B above, don’t worry. That headline was written by a real journalist and meant to be plausible — but it never happened. President Joe Biden did not sign a bill mandating that educators teach climate change in elementary schools.

Both answers are from a quiz Angelucci and Prat conducted in March 2022. Participants had one minute to record which headlines they thought were true and which were fabricated.

“The average person is very well capable of distinguishing mainstream real news,” says Angelucci.

The findings “cast doubt” on media narratives that objective truth is dying, write Angelucci and Prat.

“It’s a really impressive paper, and the most comprehensive and rigorous study I’ve seen that assesses the level of knowledge, the level of news knowledge, in the mass public,” says Andy Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, who was not involved with the research but provided early feedback.

Angelucci and Prat recruited four journalists to create the fake headlines. The journalists came from television, radio and local newspapers. They also selected the real headlines used in the surveys, drawn from Reuters wire articles on U.S. politics and based on the journalists’ judgment of their editorial significance.

(The last survey, conducted in March 2022, was drawn from Associated Press stories, because Reuters went behind a paywall in April 2021.)

Specifically, Angelucci and Prat instructed the journalists to put on their editor-in-chief hats: Pick the most important stories in U.S. politics to cover in a given week. The paper succeeds in creating a procedure that can be used in future research, Guess says, in relying on journalists to select a sample of newsworthy, real articles published by a global news outlet that covers nearly every notable political and policy event.

Coming up with a well-defined, replicable procedure to sample articles has been “one of the key challenges,” in analyzing news knowledge, Guess says.

Trouble identifying truth across socioeconomic groups

The three most recent survey rounds, conducted in October 2020, February 2021 and March 2022, included two quizzes each. One quiz offered three real headlines and three fabricated headlines created by the journalists. The other quiz had three real headlines and three fake headlines that circulated online, provided by fact checking site Snopes.

The real headlines appeared between May 2019 and March 2022, and were presented to participants within weeks or days of publication. Overall, the average fake headline, whether created by the journalists or from Snopes, was selected by participants 25% of the time, on average.

Angelucci and Prat then used the data they collected to build statistical models to explore differences in people’s ability to evaluate news across socioeconomic and partisan lines. Survey participants were drawn from panels convened by polling firm YouGov, which provides participants’ demographic information, such as age, family income, education and race or ethnicity, along with political party affiliation.

Statistical modeling is a fairly common way social scientists analyze survey results. It allows them to control for what are called latent characteristics — things researchers cannot observe, such as how plausible individual participants perceived the true and fake news headlines to be.

Based on the model, white, college-educated men under age 52, with relatively high incomes, had the highest odds, 89%, of choosing the correct answer when presented with a true and a false headline. Women under age 52 with lower incomes and education levels who were racial or ethnic minorities had the lowest odds, 71%, of selecting the true headline.

Despite the stark difference between some socioeconomic groups, even those more likely to select the fake headline still had a good chance of picking the true headline.

“They’re still more likely to get it right than wrong,” Angelucci says.

Those more politically engaged and likely to vote, who also tend to be older and have a college education, are more likely to choose the true headline, according to the model.

“We don’t know why young people are not as well informed as older people,” Angelucci says. “But age is the single most important predictor of knowledge.”

Angelucci notes, however, that social media confounds this trend, because “people who go on social media tend to be less informed than the general population,” he says.

The analytic results suggest partisanship is not a major factor in discerning true headlines. Overall, the model indicates people presented with one true and one fake headline have an 83% chance of picking the true headline when the news was positive about their political party — that ticked down just two percentage points, to 81%, when the news was unfavorable to their party.

Recognizing truth in a ‘post-truth’ world

The idea that Americans are living in a “post-truth world” gained some immediate currency during the second half of the 2010s, though the idea has existed since at least the 1990s. Angelucci and Prat write that the phrases “death of truth” and “post-truth world” have become “commonplace” in popular books and other media, “and are often accompanied by calls for immediate action to counter this risk.”

The post-truth narrative rose amid a tempest of political upheaval, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, and technological upheaval, in the form of proliferating social media allowing unfettered self-publishing of dangerous conspiracies.

While it is difficult to narrow down a precise and widely accepted definition of “post-truth,” the phrase “especially refers to a sociopolitical condition perceived as rifer than ever before with dishonesty and distrust, inaccuracies or false knowledge, all corresponding to a crisis of shared trusted adjudicating authorities,” writes Jayson Harsin, an associate professor of communication, media and culture at the American University of Paris, in a December 2018 paper in the journal Communication.

The post-truth world that fascinated many in the news media during the waning years of the 2010s was aptly captured by Barack Obama during the waning days of his presidency. In a November 2016 article, Obama told New Yorker editor David Remnick that “the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

In her 2018 book, “The Death of Truth,” former New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani likewise wondered: “How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?”

When Kakutani’s book was released, Trump was making nearly six misleading claims per day, according to a Washington Post tally. Those misleading claims were being shared to varying degrees across social media.

One literature review, published in November 2021 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, identified several analyses indicating that the proliferation of social media has contributed to political polarization.

While the new paper does not eliminate questions on what it means to live in a post-truth society, it does suggest, at some basic level, that many Americans are yet able to agree on the truth and falsity of political news.

Angelucci doesn’t dispute that polarization is real. What’s interesting for future research, and troubling at the same time, he says, is what truth means.

“It must be that we just — it’s not so much interpret the information differently, though that, too,” he says. “We literally think about the world differently. And so, throwing information at people, unfortunately, will not solve the problem.”

3 tips for covering political misinformation online

Guess, the Princeton professor, has extensively studied how social media use influences the U.S. electorate, including how algorithms and reshares affect political polarization in recent papers published in Science.

For journalists covering online misinformation, he offers three tips based on his research and other studies on misinformation.

1. Be specific about who is exposed to misinformation and avoid overplaying the extent to which misinformation affects all voters.

Certain segments of the voting population are “awash” in misinformation or, at least, are readily exposed to “news content that is produced by untrustworthy sources that lack standards of journalistic verification,” he says.

For example, fake news tends to circulate most among people over age 65, as well as those who are more politically conservative. While these trends are not fixed and could change in the coming years, they have held since around the mid-2010s.

“The misinformation problem is often stated in very general terms,” Guess says. “In other words, as if misinformation is equally likely to be seen by anyone on social media.”

2. Think of misinformation as a supply and demand equation, and not necessarily the end of the world as we know it.

There is clearly demand among some individuals and groups for false information, Guess says. Why do people seek out information that aligns with their politics, even if that information is untrue?

There are also clearly a host of people and groups willing to produce it.

“Every time there’s a new technological development, like generative AI, the tendency is to frame it as a sort of, all-encompassing technology that’s going to manipulate a passive public without their awareness,” Guess says. “I’m not ruling out that something like that could happen, but I think often the assumption that will happen is sort of baked into the coverage, as opposed to just looking at the nuts and bolts of, who is producing it, what the reach is, and what the impact will be on real people’s news diets?”

3. Give context and remember that denominators are your friend.

Numbers are often reported without context, Guess observes. Say a piece of misinformation created by a Russian troll farm was shared on X, formerly Twitter, a million times. How does that compare with the total number of shares on X over a given time frame, or to shares of real news across the platform?

“You need to take the denominator into account,” Guess says. “And think about also the perspective of individual users. What proportion of their daily news diet are we talking about? And it’s probably just a miniscule fraction. If journalists think these numbers are important, then context is really critical.”

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The U.S. economy is in good health, on the whole, according to national indicators watched closely by economists and business reporters. For example, unemployment is low and the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows stronger than expected hiring at the end of 2023.

Yet news reports and opinion polls show many Americans are pessimistic on the economy — including in swing states that will loom large in the 2024 presidential election. Some recent polls indicate the economy is by far the most important issue heading into the election.

Journalists covering the economy in the coming months, along with the 2024 political races, can use academic research to inform their interviews with sources and provide audiences with context.

The studies featured in the roundup below explore how people filter the national economy through their personal financial circumstances — and those circumstances vary widely in the U.S. The top tenth of households by wealth are worth $7 million on average, while the bottom half are worth $51,000 on average, according to the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

We’ve also included several questions, based on the research, which you can use in interviews with policy makers and others commenting on the economy, or as a jumping off point for thinking about this topic.

The economic state of play

Similarly, 78% of people who responded to a December 2023 Gallup poll rated current economic conditions as fair or poor. Gallup pollsters have reported similar figures since COVID-19 shutdowns began in March 2020.

Explanations and insights

The tone of news coverage is one possible explanation for the disconnect between actual economic performance and how individuals perceive it, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis. Since 2018 — including during and after the recession sparked by COVID-19 — economic reporting has taken on an increasingly negative tone, despite economic fundamentals strengthening in recent years, the analysis finds. The Brookings authors use data from the Daily News Sentiment Index, a measure of “positive” and “negative” economic news, produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The six studies featured below offer further insights. All are based on surveys and polls, some of which the researchers conducted themselves. Several also explore economic perception in other countries.

The findings suggest:

• Economic inequality tends to lead people into thinking the economy is zero-sum, meaning one group’s economic success comes at the expense of others.
• In both wealthy and poorer countries, belief in conspiracy theories leads people to think the economy is declining — things were once OK, now they are not.
• In the U.S., political partisanship may be a more accurate predictor of economic perception than actual economic performance.
• Households at higher risk of experiencing poverty are less likely to offer a positive economic assessment, despite good macroeconomic news.

Research roundup

Economic Inequality Fosters the Belief That Success Is Zero-Sum
Shai Davidai. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2023.

The study: How does economic inequality in the U.S. affect whether individuals think prosperity is zero-sum? A zero-sum outlook indicates that “the gains of the few come at the expense of the many,” writes Davidai, an assistant professor of business at Columbia University, who surveyed 3,628 U.S. residents across 10 studies to explore the relationship between inequality and zero-sum thinking.  

In one study, participants answered questions about how they experience economic inequality in their personal lives. In another, participants read about the salaries of 20 employees at one of three randomly assigned hypothetical companies. The first company had a range of very low and very high salaries. The second had high salaries with little variation. The third had low salaries with little variation. Participants were then asked if they interpreted the distribution of wages as equal or unequal, as well as about their political ideology. Davidai uses several other designs across the 10 surveys.

The findings: Participants who read about the company with highly unequal salaries were more apt to report zero-sum economic beliefs. Overall, when controlling for factors including income, education and political ideology, the perception of the existence of economic inequality led to more zero-sum thinking. Davidai also suggests that while people with higher incomes may not perceive their own success as having resulted from others experiencing loss, the existence of inequality could lead them to think generally about economic gains in zero-sum terms.

The author writes: While “the belief that the rich gain at the expense of the poor helps explain why perceived inequality fosters a view of the world as unjust,” Davidai notes that “zero-sum beliefs may also have some positive implications. Since perceived inequality fosters a view of ‘the rich’ as gaining at others’ expense, it may bolster support for disparity-mitigating policies.”

Multinational Data Show that Conspiracy Beliefs are Associated with the Perception (and Reality) of Poor National Economic Performance
Matthew Hornsey, et. al. European Journal of Social Psychology, October 2022.

The study: Using survey data from 6,723 university students across 36 countries, the authors investigate the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and negative views of current and future national economic success, measured by GDP.

Participants were from Turkey, Colombia, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Canada, China, France, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., among others. The same conspiracy can have different levels of meaning to people in different countries. For example, “conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana might have different cultural relevance in the United Kingdom than they do in China.” For this reason, the authors kept their questions high-level and asked about participants’ willingness to believe that government actors collude in a systematic way to “hide the truth” from the public.

The findings: People were more likely to believe in conspiracies in countries with relatively low GDP per capita. Conspiracy beliefs were also higher among participants who thought their nation was in poor economic health. Individual financial circumstances among participants were not related to a greater propensity to believe in conspiracies, though the authors note this finding is not generalizable, as their sample consisted of young, mostly middle-class university students. In other words, their sample was not representative of overall national demographics.

The authors write: “These relationships did not seem to be a reflection of a general disagreeable orientation; indeed, the more strongly people self-reported having conspiracy beliefs, the more positively they reported the economic performance of the country in the past. As such, those high in conspiracy belief were characterized by a sense of economic deterioration: things were good once, but not so much now and going forward.”

Evaluating the Unequal Economy: Poverty Risk, Economic Indicators, and the Perception Gap
Timothy Hellwig and Dani Marinova. Political Research Quarterly, March 2022.

The study: Broad, aggregate measures of a nation’s economic health, such as GDP, fail to capture individual economic experiences, the authors write. Instead, the authors analyze poverty risk. To do that, they examined data from 27 countries from European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions surveys, along with public opinion surveys. Data for each country is either from 2009 or 2014. The focus on poverty “captures not only currently experienced problems but also anticipated ones,” the authors write. The authors classify a household as at risk of experiencing poverty if its members were relatively less likely to say that the economy improved over the past year.

The findings: The authors take the position that “poverty risk serves as a filter for macroeconomic information.” For those with no risk of experiencing poverty, strong GDP performance means an overall rosy economic outlook. But those at a higher risk of poverty are less likely to offer a positive assessment of an economy, despite good macroeconomic news, such as GDP growth or low unemployment numbers. Aggregate national data points are “far removed from their daily struggles,” as the authors put it.

The authors write: “We further show that those at risk of poverty know less about economic performance by standard economic indicators but offer more accurate estimates of national poverty rates. These novel findings underline the need to depart from familiar indicators and address how unequal economies structure preferences and policy responses.”

Perception of Economic Inequality Weakens Americans’ Beliefs in Both Upward and Downward Socioeconomic Mobility
Alexander Browman, Mesmin Destin and David Miele. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, March 2022.

The study: Economic mobility works both ways. It can mean moving up the economic ladder or moving down. The authors explore the relationship between strong beliefs that personal financial health in the U.S is unequal, with a small number of people holding disproportionate wealth, and whether stratified economic classes are unlikely to shift. The authors conducted three online surveys, not representative of national demographics, among 618 U.S. adults in 2018 and 2020.

The findings: Participants who strongly believed that a small number of individuals hold most of the wealth in the U.S. were more likely to also believe that the rich would stay rich while people with low income were unlikely to climb the economic ladder.

The researchers also found that Americans’ perceptions of inequality may be becoming more accurate — the participants in the 2020 study more accurately estimated the wealth held by the nation’s richest 20%, compared with participants in the surveys conducted two years prior.

The authors write: “[Participants] believed that social class groups in their country were largely ossified and impermeable, and thus that Americans were unlikely to move out of the groups they were born into.”

Cognitive Political Economy: A Growing Partisan Divide in Economic Perceptions
David Brady, John Ferejohn and Brett Parker. American Politics Research, January 2022.

The study: The authors explore what they call a “puzzling” gap in political research: how being a Democrat or Republican might affect people’s perception of whether the national economy is doing well or poorly. Namely, the paper aims to reveal whether the difference in partisan perception has widened across more than two decades, as well as the root causes of any change. The authors examine results from 234 monthly Gallup polls conducted between 1999 and 2020 to see how people responded to Gallup’s ongoing question asking whether the economy is getting better or worse.

The findings: By the end of the period studied, both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to have a dim view of the economy when a president of the opposing party was in office, compared with the beginning of the period studied. The authors observe the biggest gap in September 2020. At that time — roughly six months after widespread COVID-19 shutdowns began — 78% of Republicans thought the economy was getting better, compared with 5% of Democrats. Democrats and Republicans were most closely in agreement on how the economy was doing in January 2009, when only 17% of participants from either party thought the economy was on an upswing, a reflection of the recession happening at the time.

Democrats were more optimistic about the economy when a Democrat was president and the same was true for Republicans during Republican administrations. Independents were not swayed by the party holding the presidency. There were two recessions during the period studied. The authors find that data about the economy is only relevant to economic perceptions during the recessions, “otherwise, individuals are largely content to rely on their partisan affiliation.”

The authors write: “Whatever the role of economic factors in partisan economic perceptions, it is nevertheless clear that political variables are of primary importance. Moreover, it appears the influence of those variables is becoming more pervasive.”

Economic Self-Interest and Americans’ Redistributive, Class, and Racial Attitudes: The Case of Economic Insecurity
Cody Melcher. Political Behavior, March 2021.

The study: Melcher, a sociologist at Loyola University New Orleans, uses the 2016 American National Election Studies survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults to examine how they perceive their personal economic health, currently and over the coming year. He then examines how these economic perceptions affect participants’ social and political views.

The findings: Respondents worried about experiencing economic hardship in the future tended to have a negative attitude toward powerful and rich business entities. The same negative attitude toward big business was expressed by people expecting to become unemployed during the coming year. Those with high anxiety over facing general economic hardship were also more likely to agree that the federal government should enact policies aimed at improving employment. Those specifically expecting job loss were less likely to perceive the U.S. as a country that, broadly, offers economic opportunities. They also were more likely to align with “the perception that ‘many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead.’”

The author writes: “The evidence presented here makes it clear that existing measures and conceptualizations of economic self-interest — and the body of empirical work that discounts economic factors in American public opinion — need to be rethought in light of economic insecurity.”

Questions for sources

Here are some questions you may find worth asking sources, based on this research:

• For people with lower levels of income, do they see the economic gains for some corresponding to others losing out? Or, do they interpret the economy as an ever-expanding pie, able to accommodate all who have the ability and desire to profit? The answers may help explain individual rationales behind perceptions of national economic performance.  
• Among people who believe in conspiracies, did that belief coincide with a personal economic shock — for example, job loss or a major medical expense?
• Are people able to reflect on the specific reasons they think the economy is doing well when a president of their same political party is in office? For people who have voted in several presidential elections, do they feel they are now less likely than in the past to think the economy would be in good hands under a president of the opposing party?

The post Why people think the economy is doing worse than it is: A research roundup appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

There is a band of water across the equatorial Pacific Ocean, stretching from the coast of South America through to the island nations of Southeast Asia, whose temperature climatologists closely monitor as a driver of global weather patterns.

Typically, warm water that settles around Indonesia during early spring works as an atmospheric engine, an energy source that affects weather patterns around the world for the coming year.

But every two to seven years, this atmospheric engine shifts. When unusually warm water settles instead off the western coasts of Mexico and South America during the spring, the moisture and energy released into the atmosphere can profoundly change regional weather, from North America and South America to Asia and Africa.

This phenomenon is part of a broader climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The warm phase of ENSO is simply called El Niño. La Niña, its opposite, happens when those eastern Pacific waters are cooler than normal in the spring. A third, neutral phase, happens when Pacific waters are near average temperature.

As of mid-November, forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration give a more than 55% chance of a strong El Niño this winter. Odds are 35% for a historically strong El Niño, like those that happened from 2015 to 2016, and 1997 to 1998. Odds are 62% that El Niño will persist into spring 2024.

The stronger an El Niño, the higher the likelihood of flood, drought and other regional weather consequences. This topic is relevant to environmental journalists and business journalists alike — and we’ve created this explainer to help reporters explain the consequences of this periodic weather pattern to their audiences.

Here is what this El Niño explainer will cover:  

• How weather that deviates from regular expectations can have devastating economic consequences, particularly for people working in industries like fishing and agriculture who rely on some measure of climactic predictability.
• The findings of recent research that puts average global economic losses during El Niño years in the trillions of dollars.
• The effects of climate change on El Niño, which are poised to substantially increase that tally in the decades to come, research finds.

El Niño: ‘The most predictable climate driver’

El Niño and La Niña patterns last several months to a year, though sometimes longer. A strong El Niño is often followed the next year by a La Niña pattern.

“ENSO is the most predictable climate driver at seasonal timescales,” write the authors of a June 2021 paper in the journal Environmental Hazards.

But specific weather observed during past El Niño patterns may not appear in the same way during subsequent ones. While climatologists can predict an El Niño pattern with a high level of probability, precise regional effects are less predictable.

“Every El Niño is different,” says Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral scholar of earth system science at Stanford University. “They all have slightly different patterns, or slightly different effects.”

In order to understand how El Niño stunts global economic growth and how it hampers local and regional economies, it will help to first understand predictions for regional weather based on historical analyses of this climate pattern, especially for journalists covering and communicating its effects over the coming months.

How El Niño can affect regional weather

Past El Niño events have meant warm, dry air for Southeast Asia and northern Australia during the northern hemisphere’s winter months. Rain and cooler air appear in the southern U.S. during the winter months there.

In South America, countries situated in the northwest and along the mid-Atlantic coast have seen wetter, warmer weather. The Gulf of Alaska and western Canada have experienced warmer temperatures during past El Niño events. El Niño patterns can even alter shorelines, finds research published June 2023 in Nature Communications.

NOAA forecasters predict, as of mid-October, higher than usual temperatures in the U.S. Northwest and Northeast during the winter. Across much of the U.S. South, they predict equal odds of higher or lower temperatures. There’s a slightly greater chance of rain across the middle of the country and along the eastern seaboard, with higher chances of precipitation in the Southeast, the forecasters predict.

Climatologists and meteorologists deal in probabilities, and predictions are not certainties. Ten days is about as far as meteorologists can reliably predict when it comes to specific weather patterns. Climatologists study weather events and atmospheric patterns over the long term — anything greater than about two weeks.

“You look at these seasonal outlooks and such that are influenced by El Niño, and it might shift the odds to a 60% chance of heavy rains as opposed to the average, which might be a 33% chance,” says Emily Becker, associate director of the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. “That also still means there’s a 40% chance that you won’t have those heavy rains. That’s where El Niño’s information is provided — it’s in how the chances of certain events change. It never gives you a guarantee.”

How El Niño stunts global economic growth

Recent studies indicate El Niño patterns can significantly stunt economic growth. El Niño “drives considerable impacts that include El Niño-related droughts in western Pacific regions, floods in eastern Pacific regions and severe food shortage and cyclones to Pacific Island countries,” write the authors of a May 2023 paper published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

Globally, Callahan and Mankin attribute $5.7 trillion in unrealized economic gains, measured by GDP, over the five years following the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, along with $4.1 trillion associated with the 1982-to-1983 El Niño. For some countries, like Peru, El Niño hasn’t just meant unrealized gains — overall economic growth shrunk in the following years.

Callahan and Mankin note that the 1997-to-1998 El Niño was stronger than the 1982-to-1983 El Niño, and the world economy was larger in the late 1990s than in the early 1980s.

“El Niño events can produce extreme climate conditions that range from extreme rainfall to drought, to heat, to wildfire, to landslides to disease outbreaks,” Callahan says. “All of these things appear to sort of combine and integrate, to produce economic stress that lasts for five, or even up to 10 years, making these events far more costly than we realized.”

Wenju Cai, director of southern hemisphere oceans research at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, and coauthors find similar economic consequences in a September 2023 paper published in Nature Communications.

Using an analysis slightly different from Callahan and Mankin, they estimate the global economy would have been $2.1 trillion larger over the following three years if not for the 1997-to-1998 El Niño, and $3.9 trillion larger if not for the 2015-to-2016 El Niño.

La Niña can bring catastrophic rains to Southeast Asia and nearby regions, including some of the worst flooding in the history of Queensland, Australia during the 2010 La Niña. But fisheries off the Pacific coast of South America tend to do well, and some La Niña events have been shown to modestly boost global economic growth. Cai and coauthors associate the 1998-to-1999 strong La Niña with $60 billion in global economic gains.

Crucially, they also estimate that strong El Niño patterns linked to continued high emissions of greenhouse gasses could mean an additional $33 trillion in global economic losses through the end of the century.

“Greenhouse warming is likely to increase frequency and intensity of extreme El Niño events,” Cai explained by email. “An El Niño typically leads to a global economic loss in trillions of US dollars. Thus, an increase in El Niño frequency and amplitude will lead to more frequent extreme weather events that are more devastating in affected regions, and globally a greater loss in economic production, particularly in developing and emerging economies.”

Flood, drought and disease from El Niño patterns

While El Niño patterns tend to hamper the global economy, they can also be costly for local and regional economies. Take the southern U.S.: El Niño years often mean more rain than usual there, and flooding is the “most common and damaging natural disaster” in the U.S., write the authors of a July 2019 paper published in Weather, Climate and Society.

“The livelihood and socio-economic development of majority of the people in East African countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda largely depend on rain-fed agricultural activities,” write the authors. “The region is often affected by incidences of climate and weather extremes and is among the most flood-prone countries in Africa.”

For Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, the strong 2015-to-2016 El Niño pattern brought severe drought, “which caused crops to fail shortly after planting and resulted in region-wide food deficit warnings,” write the authors of an April 2021 paper in Environment and Development Economics. 

The country particularly relies on maize for food and commerce. Since the 1990s, Zambian farmers have used sustainable land practices, such as crop rotation and soil and water conservation, according to the paper. Because El Niño patterns are generally predictable months in advance, farmers there were able to diversify production — but it wasn’t enough to make up the income from lost crops.

“We find that maize yields were substantially reduced and that household incomes were only partially protected from the shock thanks to diversification strategies,” the authors conclude. “Mechanical erosion control measures and livestock diversification emerge as the only strategies that provided yield and income benefits under weather shock.”

The results of a June 2020 paper in the journal Quaternary looks at drought data in Thailand over the past 2,000 years and finds mixed results as to whether El Niño patterns bring drought there. The authors conclude that “droughts are not a product of one climate pattern, but likely the result of numerous patterns interacting.”

Communities in the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste “suffer from recurrent droughts, often related to El Niño,” write the authors of a September 2021 paper published in Water Resources Research. El Niño-driven droughts are likely to severely reduce local water supplies, they find. The authors use hydrological modelling to estimate a 60% decline in streamflow and groundwater during an extreme El Niño pattern, with the nearby ocean temperature rising 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than usual.

La Niña, by contrast, brings intense storms to the province, which can help recharge groundwater aquifers, but are also “characterized by high sediment loads and often rush through the watersheds within hours,” the authors write.

“A key result is that with business-as-usual water use in combination with population growth and a change toward a drier climate … a decline in groundwater storage may be expected,” they conclude. “This would have substantial consequences for communities and agriculture that rely on groundwater especially during the long dry season.”

Flooding, extreme storms and fires related to El Niño patterns can make transportation difficult or impossible, with higher risks during El Niño years that roads, rail and other infrastructure could be wiped out in California, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories, finds research published December 2021 in Progress in Disaster Science.

Finally, El Niño patterns affect not just land and infrastructure, but have also been linked to disease outbreaks. Southeast Asia, Tanzania, the western U.S. and Brazil all saw disease outbreaks linked to the 2015-to-2016 El Niño, find the authors of a February 2019 paper in Scientific Reports. These outbreaks included plague in Colorado and New Mexico, cholera in Tanzania and dengue in Brazil.

“Extreme climate conditions, such as flooding associated with severe storms and natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, or earthquakes, can disrupt water systems — exposing drinking water to waste water and other effluents — thus increasing the risk of cholera activity and other water-borne infections,” the authors write.

How climate change affects El Niño patterns

The science is settled that the world is warming at a historically fast rate due to humanity’s inventions, such as gasoline-powered vehicles and electric power.

“Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1 [degrees Celsius] above 1850 to 1900 levels in 2011 to 2020,” write the authors of a 2023 summary report for policymakers from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While scientific consensus is not there when it comes to how climate change affects El Niño patterns, recent research explores specific links between global warming caused by humans, which is known as anthropogenic warming, and increasing variability in Pacific Ocean temperatures that fuel El Niño conditions.

The May 2023 paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment uses statistical modeling techniques to explore the effects of global warming on El Niño and La Niña patterns over the past 120 years — Cai is lead author.

This type of analysis is common in climate science research and is based on a complex series of computer models that simulate weather conditions. The authors acknowledge that when it comes to the intensity of El Niño and La Niña patterns, real-world data only goes back decades and is lower quality before the 1950s.

Still, they write that “determining the anthropogenic contributions to changing ENSO variability is vital to attribute causes of extreme events that are becoming more frequent and severe to understand ENSO projection and to gauge urgency of mitigation actions.” Cai also notes in an email to The Journalist’s Resource that the modeling approach used in the paper is the same as what the IPCC uses.

The authors find more than three-fourths of models show more frequent, stronger El Niño and La Niña patterns from 1961 to 2020 compared with 1901 to 1960. Taken together, the modelling results and other evidence in the paper “suggest that the increase in observed ENSO variability post-1960 is at least in part related to anthropogenic warming,” the authors write.

And it’s not just that models indicate El Niño patterns are likely becoming stronger. Global warming creates conditions that can exacerbate the effects of those patterns.

“For example, in areas where El Niño causes drought, higher air temperature due to greenhouse warming increases evaporation, so drought onset is earlier, drought is more severe, and drought is harder to get out,” Cai explained by e-mail. “In areas where El Niño causes flood, warmer air holds more water vapor, making the flood more extreme.”

The authors of another recent paper, published October 2023 in Geophysical Research Letters, examine the geologic record contained within stalagmites from southeastern Alaskan caves to analyze the core causes of El Niño patterns over millennia.

Climate in the Northeast Pacific is very influenced by water temperature in the equatorial Pacific — this is a teleconnection, a “pattern of influence,” as Callahan puts it, where a change in the atmosphere or water in one part of the world affects weather in another. The Aleutian Low, a low-pressure pattern that lingers over the Gulf of Alaska for much of the year, is stronger when the equatorial Pacific Ocean is warmer, bringing more rain than average to the southern Alaskan coast and northwestern Canada.

Stalagmites, which rise from a cave floor, and stalactites, which grow down from a cave roof, are part of the mineral deposit family known as speleothems. These deposits are “excellent at capturing atmospheric conditions over the past 3,500 years,” the authors write. Through the flow of water into and out of the cave and the natural dripping of water from cave roof to floor, the authors were able to look back in time at the existence of El Niño and La Niña patterns.

“It’s recording stable isotopes trapped in the rock, particularly Oxygen-18, which derives from precipitation,” says lead author Paul Wilcox, a postdoctoral researcher with the Innsbruck Quaternary Research Group in Austria. “Typically, we can only access that isotope by drilling small bits of powdered rock from the stalagmite, but this sample was unique in that it also contained trace amounts of water. It’s difficult to get that in a lot of records, and we were lucky enough to have samples that had enough water and grew fast enough to piece together a high-resolution record of ancient precipitation.”

Parts of the stalagmite sample with relatively high levels of Oxygen-18 indicate a weaker Aleutian Low — meaning that while that part of the stalagmite was forming, El Niño events were probably happening less frequently. Likewise, lower levels of the oxygen isotope indicate a stronger Aleutian Low, and the likely presence of more persistent El Niño patterns.

The other key part of this study has to do with solar irradiance, which is a measure of the naturally fluctuating energy from the sun that reaches the top of the earth’s atmosphere. Solar irradiance was the driving force behind El Niño and La Niña patterns for 2,000 years, until the 1970s, the authors find. They link La Niña patterns with more solar irradiance, and El Niño patterns with less solar irradiance.

Through satellite imagery and other measures, climatologists since the 1960s have known that the movement of air and water in different parts of the Pacific are not independent and random, but rather part of a larger system.

That system has changed, with connections between wind, water and atmosphere across the Pacific weakening since the 1970s. The authors point to data from the stalagmite as indicating that this change is linked to the remarkably high emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, stemming from human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

“There is a noticeable change in El Niño and La Niña variability that’s been known for several decades,” Wilcox says. “The problem is, there was too short of a record to really pinpoint if humans were causing this change or not. And this is where geologic records like the one we produced helps — kind of really more convincingly shows that this was likely human caused.”

Of the five strong El Niño events since 1901, three have happened since the 1970s, according to a September 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Similar to a December 2019 paper in Geophysical Research Letters, the authors of the PNAS paper identify a westward shift since the 1970s in the “warm center” that catalyzes El Niño patterns, coinciding with “a rapid warming in the Indo-Pacific warm pool,” which they note may or may not be due entirely to human activity.

Still, if temperatures in the western Pacific continue to warm, and if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at current rates, “more frequent extreme El Niño events will induce profound socioeconomic consequences,” the authors write.

The post El Niño: What it is, how it devastates economies, and where it intersects with climate change appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

The farm bill is wide-ranging legislation that sets funding and directs priorities for a variety of federal food consumption and production programs in the U.S. — plus, economic development programs aimed at improving broadband access and providing small business loans, among other things, in rural areas.

Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years. The first farm bill was passed in 1933, with 18 farm bills having been passed in all. The most recent farm bill passed as the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 and it expires at the end September, the end of the federal fiscal year.

Legislators are making the case for the next farm bill to include funding that supports the interests of their constituents, as well as lobbying and advocacy groups. To help guide journalists in coverage of those debates, The Journalist’s Resource is taking a look at academic research on three pillars of farm bills: SNAP, environmental conservation and rural development.

The research featured in this miniseries can inform the questions that journalists at local, regional and national outlets ask of federal lawmakers.

This week, we’re focusing on rural development.

Rural development programs aim to spur business development and improve rural quality of life. These programs directly affect the economic health of rural areas in real ways, such as by providing small businesses with access to loans and funding infrastructure for high-speed internet connections.

There are more than a dozen rural development programs that are part of the farm bill.

“The United States Farm Bill is a sprawling, complex piece of omnibus legislation flying largely under the public radar,” write the authors of a May 2020 paper published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. “It influences eaters, growers, land and water, rural, urban and suburban communities alike, across the country and across the world.”

Rural development programs make up a small fraction of the overall farm bill budget, and funding is largely discretionary. That means the farm bill gives Congress the ability to appropriate a maximum amount for these programs each year. Congress can later change those yearly funding caps.

Recent research finds programs that expand broadband access and provide federally guaranteed loans are associated with increased local wages, reduced risk that small businesses will fail, and other findings featured in the research roundup below.

Under the federal loan guarantee program, the federal government insures 80% of the amount of a loan made by a bank or credit union. The goal is to encourage and enable capital needed for rural entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses.

The way the federal government defines “rural” varies by program, but population counts are “the primary factor used in rural definitions to determine eligible rural areas,” according to an April 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service.

For firms to qualify for the business loan programs, they need to do business in a town or other area with fewer than 50,000 people. USDA grants and loans for utility companies to build out broadband service are for areas with fewer than 20,000 people.

About 14.5 million people lack broadband, and about 11 million of them live in rural areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission’s most recent estimate, published in January 2021.

The FCC defines broadband as download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second. Critics have contended that rural connections may inconsistently reach that speed but still count as broadband, indicating that the number without reliable broadband could be higher. The FCC has used the 25 mpbs benchmark since 2015. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office found that from 2014 to 2021, there have been “inconsistencies in the scope of FCC’s analysis of the benchmark speed and in the explanation of FCC’s rationale for updating or not updating the benchmark.”

A strong internet connection is a necessity for carrying out day-to-day business for most firms, but it’s particularly important during times of crisis. A September 2023 paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics links every 1 percentage point increase in broadband access in rural counties with $20 more in per capita payments from the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided financial assistance to agricultural producers during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In addition to the unprecedented size of the disaster relief program, CFAP was also unique in that it was the first farm support program that allowed producers to enroll through an online portal rather than in person through a local Farm Service Agency,” the authors write.

Keep reading for more insights on what academic research says about rural development programs aimed at expanding broadband access and guaranteeing loans to businesses.

Research roundup

The Impact of USDA’s Business and Industry Loan Guarantee Program on Tax Revenue in Oklahoma Communities
Ty Rope Smith and Brian Whitacre. Community Development, January 2021.

The study: The authors explore the relationship between farm bill programs aimed at rural economic improvement and sales tax revenue, an “often-overlooked component of effective rural development,” they write. The authors analyze retail sales tax data in 57 municipalities in Oklahoma with fewer than 50,000 people that charged sales tax from 2005 to 2015 — along with data on businesses in those municipalities that received loans insured by the federal Business and Industry Loan Guarantee program.

The findings: Guaranteed rural business loans are associated with a positive and statistically significant effect on retail sales — but this effect only held for when the national economy was doing well, from 2005 to 2010. The authors did not find an association between these loans and improved retail sales from 2010 to 2015, years overlapping much of the slow economic recovery from the Great Recession.

The authors write: “The results also offer strong guidance that policymakers should stay the course over a long time horizon since such downturns cannot be predicted in advance. These findings have implications for future policy evaluation efforts: differing underlying economic conditions can impact evaluation results, and should be considered as an important component of the broader evaluation.”

Stimulating Innovation: Statutory Influence on Electric Cooperative Telecommunications Innovation
Jamie Greig. Journal of Information Policy, May 2020.

The study: The author explores bureaucratic barriers preventing electric service cooperatives, which largely serve rural areas, from also offering broadband internet.

Electricity cooperatives are owned by customers, and profits are reinvested into the cooperative — for example, to maintain or expand infrastructure. There are more than 900 such cooperatives in 47 states. Many exist to distribute electricity from power grids to homes, businesses and agricultural producers in small towns and rural counties.

Nearly six dozen of those electricity cooperatives also provide broadband access, most of them since 2010, after federal legislation put $7.2 billion toward expanding rural broadband. The 2014 farm bill reauthorized rural broadband loan and grant programs, while the 2018 farm bill did the same and allowed Congress to appropriate another $350 million toward expanding rural broadband.

State laws may prevent electricity cooperatives from offering broadband. For example, in Montana and Minnesota, broadband licenses for publicly regulated utilities are only allowed in areas without competing private firms. At the time of the study, 34 states had laws stating electricity cooperatives could form primarily to provide energy services, without explicitly allowing them to provide internet.

The author collected survey responses from officials at a random sample of 210 electricity cooperatives to explore whether state laws and regulations prevent cooperatives from expanding into telecommunications. 

The findings: Nearly 18% of respondents said their electricity cooperatives offer broadband, while a little over one-third said they would in the future. Some 40% were unsure, while 5% said they did not plan to offer broadband.

Almost all respondents — 95% — identified costs to members and general investment costs as the biggest barriers to offering broadband. Nearly two-thirds said laws were a barrier to expanding into broadband, while a little over half identified regulations as an issue. The author identified only eight states that have updated their laws “to reflect the emergence of electric cooperatives as advanced telecommunications providers.”

The author writes: “This analysis shows that in the majority of states, telecommunications service offerings are not being externally stimulated by statute,” meaning most states do not have laws allowing or encouraging electricity cooperatives to offer broadband. “The results show that statutory language is affecting electric cooperatives’ decision to offer broadband service to their members. It also shows that the lack of updated statutory language to reflect a changing industry could reflect the lack of dialogue and action within the legislative environment that these entities operate.”

The Impacts of the USDA Broadband Loan and Grant Programs: Moving Toward Estimating a Rate of Return
Ivan Kandilov and Mitch Renkow. Economic Inquiry, December 2019.

The study: The authors examine the relationship between local wages and three rural broadband development programs that ran at various times from 1997 to 2007:

• A pilot loan program that made $180 million in loans to rural telecommunications providers in 2002 and 2003.
• The Community Connect Broadband Grant program, which has operated since 2002 and targets rural areas without broadband service of at least 25 Mbps.
• The current broadband loan program, enacted as part of the 2002 farm bill.

They restrict their sample to zip codes with fewer than 20,000 people across the 37 states that received at least one broadband loan or grant during the period studied.

The authors filed a freedom of information request to obtain names of counties that received a loan or grant, plus information on the size and timing of the funding. They then analyzed how average wages in the county changed after the broadband loan or grant.

The findings: The first two programs — the pilot and the Community Connect grants — did not affect local payrolls. But, for the current program, the authors associate every $1 increase in loans per capita with a 92-cent increase in yearly payroll per worker.

The authors note that it is difficult to say definitively from their study whether the benefits of the current broadband program outweigh the costs. For example, the data available for their analysis on payrolls don’t encompass people who are self-employed, nor does the data include potential higher home values related to better broadband access. Public services, such as health and education, would also likely be improved with broadband, but those effects are not captured in the analysis. In other words, there are outcomes that are difficult to quantify.

The authors write: “There is a long tradition of the federal government underwriting the costs of universal service provision, dating back to the implementation of Rural Free Delivery of mail in the late 1800s, and continuing on through Rural Electrification Administration subsidization of extending electrical service and telephone service into rural areas … Presumably, such investments reflected an assessment by policymakers that the public goods created by deployment of such integrative infrastructure were sufficiently large to outweigh the relatively steep costs of providing communication services to remote consumers of those services.”

Rural Business Programs and Business Performance: The Impact of the USDA’s Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program
Anil Rupasingha, Daniel Crown and John Pender. Journal of Regional Science, December 2018.

The study: The authors look at establishment and exit data on 1,665 businesses in rural counties across the country from 1990 to 2013 that received federally guaranteed loans. They assess whether participating in the Business and Industry Loan Guarantee program helps reduce the risk that a business will fail. For comparison, these businesses were matched with similar businesses founded in the same year in the same state, but that did not receive guaranteed loans.

The findings: Every $100,000 worth of guaranteed loans is associated with a 5% smaller risk that a business will fold within two years of receiving the loan, the authors find. After six years, every $100,000 is associated with a 2% better chance a firm will still exist. Firms also slightly increased their payrolls, by about 4%, on average, in the two years after receiving a loan. Nearly 9 in 10 businesses in the study that received a guaranteed loan were standalone firms — they were not part of a larger business with multiple locations or divisions.

The authors write: “Since the program loans can be used for investment in building, machinery, and equipment, it is conceivable that the loan investments were directed to new technologies resulting in increased productivity.”

Broadband’s Relationship to Rural Housing Values
Steven Deller and Brian Whitacre. Papers in Regional Science, May 2019.

The study: Does broadband access increase home values? The authors explore this question with data from the Federal Communications Commission and Census Bureau survey data from 2016 on home values and broadband availability across 887 rural counties. They only include counties not directly next to a metropolitan area. Most of the counties studied are in the Great Plains, with overlap in Appalachia, the upper Midwest and northern Mountain West.

The findings: Average yearly income across the counties studied was $44,000, while the average home was worth about $100,000. About two-thirds of households had access to internet speeds of at least 25 Mbps. The authors find that every 10% expansion in geographical coverage of at least 0.2 Mbps is associated with average home values in the area increasing by $661. Effects on home values decline as speeds increase. For every 10% expansion of coverage of speeds of 25 Mbps, average home values increase by $232. Speeds over 100 Mbps have no association with home values.

The authors write: “As connectivity becomes prevalent, the question will likely switch from quantifying the value-added by broadband to focus on the disadvantage of not being connected. Indeed, many businesses and individuals would choose not to locate in an area where a reliable connection is unavailable.”

The Political Economy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Business-Cooperative Service
Josh Matti. Economic Development Quarterly, April 2019.

The study: The author uses data on grants and loans made from 2006 to 2014, across the 40 states where they were disbursed, to explore whether rural development funding through the Rural Business-Cooperative Service reaches those areas and business most in need — and how members of Congress on influential agricultural committees affect which areas get federal money.

The findings: Each state receives about $1.1 million in funding, on average, via the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, the author finds. Each senator on the overall federal budget appropriations committee is associated with an additional $1.1 million, on average, in rural development funding for the state they represent — a 100% increase. Each member of Congress on House or Senate agricultural committees is associated with a 50% funding increase, on average, the author finds.

The author uses the phrase “Congressional dominance,” which originated in a 1983 paper on the Federal Trade Commission, to describe the relationship between rural development and having a member of Congress in a position to influence funding.

The author writes: “The results indicate that factors that are supposed to determine the allocation of funding do not. Congressional dominance is a plausible mechanism helping to explain why federal rural development funds do not always reach the areas of greatest need.”

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