By Christine Cooper and Chuck McShane The Commerce Department released revisions to past data last week that showed the economy grew more quickly in all but four quarters since the beginning of 2019. The revisions wiped out one of the two consecutive quarters of negative growth in early 2022, negating earlier reports of a technical […]
By Andy Peters When the NFL in 2014 named Minneapolis host city for Super Bowl LII, local leaders realized they needed to create more public space for fans to gather before and after the big game. Though they didn’t know it, officials were also about to add credence to a high-stakes theory in commercial real estate […]
By Larry Edelman To paraphrase a popular business maxim — most frequently attributed to management guru Peter Drucker — you can’t improve what you don’t measure. To that end, a leading business group on Monday unveiled the Massachusetts Competitive Index, a new gauge of the state’s economic strengths and weaknesses designed to show how we compare against […]
By Sam Doran and Sam Drysdale, State House News Service After years of debate, lawmakers finally came to an agreement to expand the number of alcohol licenses in Boston. There are 225 new licenses authorized in a compromise bill filed by House and Senate negotiators Tuesday afternoon, including 195 “restricted” licenses specifically marked for neighborhoods […]
By Hannah Green Last year, Massachusetts’ life sciences industry saw its slowest job growth since 2017 as the industry faced economic headwinds. The Bay State’s biopharma workforce consisted of 116,937 employees in 2023, according to the latest “Industry Snapshot” report put out by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, or MassBio, on Tuesday. The trade group found that […]
By Ben Casselman The U.S. economy added far fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than previously reported, a sign that cracks in the labor market are more severe — and began forming earlier — than initially believed. On Wednesday, the Labor Department said monthly payroll figures overstated job growth by roughly 818,000 in the 12 months that ended in […]
By Jeanne Whalen Americans’ once-in-a-generation job market has come to an end. The red-hot hiring and rock-bottom unemployment that helped millions of workers find new gigs, boost their wages and reinvent their careers are giving way to more prosaic times. While the market is still healthy by many measures, signs of difficulty are creeping in. The […]
By Sam Goldfarb, Peter Santilli and Anthony DeBarros The Wall Street Journal’s latest quarterly survey of business and academic economists shows forecasters remain firmly optimistic about the economic outlook, despite some hints of weakness in recent data. The following graphics show what economists are thinking now and how their forecasts—and the economy—have evolved over recent months and years. After looking at […]
By Joanne Drilling As the Covid-19 comeback continues for downtowns, much of the attention has been focused on the return to the office — or the lack thereof in many cities. But new data suggests the key to a strong downtown recovery may lie beyond the office. That’s according to the latest research by University of […]
By Norah Mulinda The stock market’s worst group notched its best day of the year as a cooler-than-expected inflation report stoked bets that the Federal Reserve will start cutting interest rates in September. Shares of real estate companies jumped 2.7% Thursday for their biggest gain of 2024, climbing to their highest level since March as investors snapped up homebuilder, digital and commercial […]
