Pioneer Institute Announces New Economics Data Tool: MassEconomix

MassEconomix features Massachusetts employment and business data

BOSTON – A new addition to Pioneer Institute’s Mass Watch data tool suite, MassEconomix, provides time-series data on job and business growth for all of Massachusetts. Pioneer has partnered with the Business Dynamics Research Consortium (BDRC), which is housed at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Business and Entrepreneurship, to acquire an employment database known as “Your-economy Time Series,” or YTS. This database provides a year-by-year look at companies and jobs that have existed in the Commonwealth since 1997.

“Local and state policymakers lack uniform, accurate economic data. As a result, too often they resemble pilots flying without instrumentation,” said Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios. “MassEconomix is a data resource that can identify micro and industry-wide business trends, and drive an understanding of the real economy. Only with that knowledge can we hope to devise  policies that will spur job creation.”

The site presents four key tools for users to look at changing business dynamics in Massachusetts. By using the Snapshot tool, users can view employment and business establishment analyses for a selected municipality. Sorting by Geography breaks the data into regional cohorts, using county, community type, workforce development area, and New England City and Town Areas (NECTAs) boundaries to explore job and business trends. The Industry tool allows users to look at trends within a given sector and industry across the state. Finally, the Data Sources feature compares the data used by MassEconomix with another database made public by the Commonwealth.

This database provides a unique look at Massachusetts employment and economic trends by including employment and location data for each firm in the Commonwealth. Through MassEconomix, such data are aggregated to provide accurate employment and establishment counts in an accessible, easy-to-analyze online interface.

MassEconomix will be available to the general public on December 12. 2019. It can either be accessed through the Mass Watch tab on Pioneer’s website, or at MassEconomix.org.

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Your-economy Time Series (YTS) contains annual, establishment-level, time series data on companies considered to be “in-business” in a given year. The YTS database provides access to information about employment trends, establishment level affiliations, relocation, and industrial sectors in any geographical area.

YTS is assembled from annual Infogroup Business Data historical files. Infogroup then works to verify this information through internet “crawling” of URLs and website scripts, telephone calls, U.S. Yellow Pages, industry directories, business registrations, and press releases. Teams also work to identify new businesses each year, as well as corporate linkages between companies that may have experienced mergers or acquisitions. Infogroup contacts 55,000 businesses daily to verify company information.

The Business Dynamics Research Consortium is a non-profit research organization with a mission to provide unique, valuable, and otherwise unattainable information to scholars who seek to understand business activities, employment creation and job flows. For the YTS database, BDRC compiles Infogroup’s yearly snapshots of business data and creates the complete time-series database used in MassEconomix.

MassWatch is Pioneer Institute’s free resource for promoting citizen engagement in state and local government by providing access to public information regarding local economies, demographics, and school districts; state employee payroll records; state and local pension liabilities; and the MBTA.

About Pioneer

Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.