Category Research

On a national level, construction workers are well-compensated for their hard work, but wages vary widely by location. Here we explore which cities pay the most.

With federal initiatives to expand the residential housing supply and rebuild America’s aging infrastructure, demand for construction workers is expected to grow. Wages in the construction industry vary widely by occupation. Researchers ranked all construction and extraction occupations according to the five-year percentage change in wages from 2017 to 2022.

Union membership in the U.S. has declined sharply over the past several decades. However, union participation remains strong in certain parts of the country. These are the cities with the highest union membership rates.

In order to cope with rising prices, millennials are taking out larger home loans with higher loan-to-value ratios than older generations. To identify where millennials are buying homes, researchers ranked metros and states according to the millennial share of conventional home purchase loans originated in 2022.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the construction industry struggled to keep up with heightened demand amid worker shortages and supply chain disruptions. While these effects continue to linger across the U.S., some locations are moving faster than others in authorizing new construction.

Construction workers remain a crucial component of the American workforce, and contribute significantly to the country's economic development. Using the latest data available, researchers at Construction Coverage identified the U.S. states and metros with the largest shares of employment in the construction industry.

The U.S. is increasingly moving towards electrification—replacing technologies that use fossil fuels with those that use electricity. Not only are private sector companies like Tesla pushing for the adoption of electric technologies to replace those that use greenhouse gas-emitting energy…

Due to the increased cost of non-renewable energy sources like oil, gas, and coal, heating bills have reached their highest level in 10 years. Energy sources continue to be limited by economic and political conditions, such as OPEC+ cutting oil…

How and where people live saw a drastic transformation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the initial lockdowns around the country aimed at slowing the virus’s spread, society reopened with a large emphasis on remote work and social distancing which…

The U.S. housing market looks drastically different than it did before the pandemic, creating numerous challenges for prospective homebuyers. The median sales price of a home skyrocketed from $329,000 in the first quarter of 2020 to $467,700 in the last…

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed how Americans work, popularizing remote work by necessity. This pivot to a work-from-anywhere mentality also created a shift in where Americans live, causing more and more people to move away from dense cities like New York,…

America’s homebuyers have had an extraordinarily difficult few years. Heavy demand and scarce inventory in late 2020 and 2021 led to record growth in prices, while a run of high inflation throughout the economy made it more difficult to save…

After two years of stiff competition and fast-rising prices, the residential housing market in the U.S. began cooling quickly over the second half of 2022 and beginning of 2023.

Homeownership offers the opportunity to accumulate wealth and keep housing costs relatively consistent over time, both of which contribute to financial stability. However, homeownership benefits have not been experienced equally. Significant racial disparities in homeownership rates have persisted for decades,…

Despite home prices starting to stabilize, becoming a homeowner remains largely out of reach for many Americans. According to The Cato Institute’s 2022 Housing Affordability National Survey, 87% of Americans are concerned about the cost of housing. In the same…