IMPLAN Blog

2018 is over.

2019 is here.

Honestly, where did the time go? It seems like just yesterday we were conversing about the 2016 IMPLAN Data Release Notes, discovering why robots aren’t actually killing jobs, and surviving the hurricanes by exploring the history of hurricanes in North Carolina.

Seriously, it has been a year to remember here at IMPLAN. These past 12 months we experienced growth internally and externally and found inspiration in every direction we looked. In that time we have also published more than 30 articles on our site, with a few standing apart from the others.

Which blogs stood apart from the others? The ones people felt inspired and intrigued by the most? Here are the 5 most popular blog posts of 2018 on the IMPLAN Blog:

We talk a lot about economic impact analysis here but the question of economic impact is only one part of a multifaceted reality.

Researchers at the Michigan Department of Transportation had a different type of question. They didn’t want to just know about the jobs that could be created from constructing trails. They didn’t want to just know about tourism and retail spending that comes when people ride bikes or walk on those trails.

Candi Clouse works for the Center of Economic Development at Cleveland State University. She is one of four people on a team known in northeast Ohio as one of the big players for economic impact analysis. To put it simply, having Cleveland State on the report lends authority to the results.

Ohio, a gem of the midwest, is filled with resilient sports fanatics, people calling soft drinks “pop,” and, more specifically, a film industry that continues to generate positive economic impacts in the Buckeye State. Greater Cleveland is home to "The Avengers"  filming location, which was the industry’s third-highest grossing film of all time with $1.5 billion in box office sales worldwide and a budget of $220 million. Candi Clouse sat down with us to discuss her favorite economic impact analysis study to date.

Data season has finally come to a close which means that the latest IMPLAN Data Year is now available! Here's what's new in this data release:

After more than a year since Amazon’s deadline for RFP submissions, over 200 subsequent submissions, and a culling of 20 possible locations earlier this spring, we’ve finally (almost) got our answer—an HQ2 with one foot in Crystal City, Virginia and another in Queens, New York. And mere hours after the news broke, markets are already reacting in some rather severe (and not altogether unexpected) ways.

Late in the summer of 1949, Wassily Leontief fed the 25-ton computer the last of the stiff paper punched with precisely-placed holes. The machine at Harvard University now had hundreds of thousands of data points about the United States economy.

Demand for jet engines is taking off. Domestic airlines have relied on up-fitting or remodeling equipment originally constructed in the 1970s or later. This generation of equipment is slowly approaching its expiry. And internationally, travel tastes have changed. Airlines are one-upping each other to offer the most top-of-the-line luxury flights which are incorporating features including personal compartments with beds, full-service bars, and incredible food options.

Amazon recently announced that it would be raising the minimum wage paid to workers to $15 per hour (minimum wage standards sometimes vary by state and city; the current federal minimum pay is $7.25). According to the company’s blog, the wage increase will go into effect on 1 November, will be extended to associates employed by temp agencies, and is anticipated to affect the paychecks of more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as more than 100,000 seasonal holiday employees. Workers at Amazon subsidiaries (including Whole Foods) will also benefit from the parent company’s new initiative to “lead on pay.”

Back in August we published a blog post to address one of the most common questions asked of us, “What Is IMPLAN?” One of the reasons this question remains a complicated one to answer is that economic impact analysis benefits such a diverse set of users (from academia, to federal government, to real estate and everything in between). To elaborate beyond what IMPLAN is and illustrate what it does, let’s take a look at some of our common user types and a high-level example of how each of them applies the power of economic impact analysis in their spheres of study or in their industry.

Being equipped with the proper data as well as the right analysis tools can help you make better and more informed business decisions. IMPLAN provides excellent data that can supplement your analyses. Our latest release of the Occupational Data Matrices joins the ranks of those supplemental data sets. This data set provides information on employment and compensation, which might just make determining wages and allocating scarce resources a less arduous task.