More than one-quarter of American homes have not adopted internet service, many citing cost as their primary reason. Since market competition can significantly affect consumer prices, we set out to ask: how many Internet service providers (ISPs) are available to consumers at different levels of download speeds?

Large firms depend on suppliers for most of their value-added. Many suppliers are small and their viability is closely tied to their ability to access and manage working capital. The Obama Administration’s SupplierPay initiative was developed to bring companies together to address the working capital challenges facing small firms. This paper explores the potential economic benefits – throughout...

The temporary help services industry has bounced back from the recession and continues to grow. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics (CES) program, the temporary help industry only accounts for 2 percent of all employment in the U.S. economy (as of July 2014) but accounts for 11 percent of all the jobs created since the end of the recession. Growth...

Everyone is talking about the importance of data to our society as data improves all of our decisions: those we make as individuals, as businesses, as governments. The federal government has been in the data business for quite some time, going back to the first decennial Census in 1790. Since then, the U.S. government has played a key role in providing valuable data to our country. Just how...

The U.S. manufacturing sector has turned a corner. For the first time in over 10 years, output and employment are growing steadily. Manufacturing output has grown 38 percent since the end of the recession, and the sector accounts for 19 percent of the rise in real gross domestic product (GDP) since then. Through May, the sector has added 646,000 jobs and manufacturers are actively recruiting to...

The United States is an increasingly attractive location for business investment from global companies. In AT Kearney’s 2013 FDI Confidence Index, the United States surged past countries like China, Brazil and India to become the country with the top FDI prospects globally, as ranked by 302 companies representing 28 countries and multiple industry sectors. 1 This marks the first time that the US...

The digital, or internet, economy has transformed many aspects of our lives over the past two decades. How we communicate, entertain ourselves, make decisions, and do business continues to evolve as the digital economy grows in size and importance. Given this transformation, it is becoming even more important for policymakers to consider how the internet affects our lives and the economy as a...

Building on previous work examining broadband availability across different geographies by population, this report examines broadband availability by job location. As in Broadband Availability, Beyond the Rural/Urban Divide , this report divides the United States into five categories based on the degree of urbanization. Rather than examining broadband and general population levels; however, this...