Category Research

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.

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…

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…

Roadways are a vital component of infrastructure in the United States. The vast majority of goods are transported by truck, highlighting the economy’s need for reliable roadways to connect supply chains and move goods and services efficiently across borders. Most…

After a record-setting surge in home prices during the COVID-19 pandemic, the cooling of the real estate market seems to have fully set in. Mortgage rates doubled over the course of 2022 as the U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates…

As concerns over climate change continue to grow, there has been a sustained effort towards electrification, or the process of replacing technologies that use fossil fuels (including coal, oil, and natural gas) with technologies that use electricity for energy. States…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought dramatic changes to the U.S. housing market. At the onset of the pandemic, housing sales and new construction initially stalled due to economic uncertainty. But as the U.S. entered survival mode and the federal funds rate…