Economic Opportunity

On Friday, Governor Healey opposed a proposed cut in the personal income tax that would put an average of $1,300 back into people’s pockets. Her claim that it would devastate the budget and gut education is a wild distortion—and it ignores more...

From April 2020 through July 2025, Massachusetts experienced a net loss of approximately 182,000 residents to domestic outmigration — the equivalent of losing one-and-a-half Cambridges. While a recent surge in international immigration temporarily boosted labor force numbers, new research from Pioneer Institute shows that underlying demographic, workforce, and economic challenges continue to threaten the Commonwealth’s long-term competitiveness. 

February's edition of The House Call discusses new legal action over Massachusetts' multifamily zoning mandate for transit-accessible communities. It also highlights a new federal data release that shows where many Massachusetts homeowners tend to overestimate - or underestimate - their property values.

Governor Maura Healey’s fiscal year 2027 budget totals $62.8 billion, a 3.8 percent year-over-year increase. The budget avoids sweeping new initiatives and largely preserves existing structures. That might be defensible in a period of stability. It is indefensible now. 

Context Pioneer Institute has previously gone toe-to-toe with the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) over flawed and misleading tax analyses—notably ITEP’s advocacy for the 2022 surtax on high earners as good for the Bay State economy. That argument that has proven to hold about...

Newly released Census Bureau data show that Massachusetts’ population growth is now entirely dependent on immigration, as domestic out-migration rose again in 2025 and underlying demographic and economic weaknesses reasserted themselves. 

Mayor Wu continues to push her effort to further raise Boston’s commercial property tax rate, even though as of 2022 the city already had the second highest ratio of commercial to residential effective tax rates among the largest cities in each state.  Wu claims that cutting Boston’s budget to...

MassOpportunity Alliance’s new economic modeling of the proposed ballot question to reduce the personal income tax from 5.0% to 4.0% confirms the findings of Pioneer Institute’s November report, Lessons from the 2000 Massachusetts Income-Tax Rollback, which analyzed what actually happened after Massachusetts cut the income tax from 5.95 percent...

BOSTON – Even after statewide legalization in 2024, production of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in Massachusetts remains far from that of other states due to local zoning and permitting practices that continue to discourage development, according to a new Pioneer Institute study. 

Our November edition of The House Call covers the dwindling availability of homes on the market in Massachusetts since 2019, even as many other states have seen full recoveries in the number of market listings after COVID. It discusses the implications of lower home availability for buyers and sellers alike and identifies a couple of major solutions.