The Lead Feed

The COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest around March 2020, with mass vaccinations beginning in the first quarter of 2021. How has the North Carolina economy changed across the worst of the crisis and its aftermath?

North Carolina's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased from February's revised rate of 3.7 percent.

In February, not seasonally adjusted unemployment rates decreased in 50 of North Carolina's 100 counties.

Where will the economy be in 2023? This blog post presents highlights from the recently released 2021-2023 Short-Term Employment Projections.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused large and lasting disruptions to labor markets. While this disruption was happening, however, data reveals that the economy had a hidden strain of hope and resilience via growth in the births of new establishments and employment associated with those births. 

As North Carolina’s economy continues to recover from the recession caused by the COVID pandemic, we wanted to investigate how women’s employment and earnings were affected to complement other recent LEAD research.

In previous LEAD Feed posts, we examined changes in employment between men and women over the course of the pandemic. Data revealed that the number of employed women grew faster than that of men and without significantly cutting their amount of time worked.  Today, we look at one reason why women’s employment rebounded from the depths of the Covid Recession so quickly – self-employment.

North Carolina's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased from January’s revised rate of 3.9 percent.

In January, not seasonally adjusted unemployment rates increased in all of North Carolina's 100 counties.

Economic data are often released in preliminary form and are subject to revision. In this article, we summarize recently published revisions to North Carolina’s unemployment and job growth estimates and discuss their implications for data users.

North Carolina's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased from December’s benchmarked rate of 4.1 percent.

In a previous LEAD Feed article, it was reported that the rate of women’s employment in NC has outpaced that of men. But were they working more? Or did they just move from working full-time to part-time?

A common belief is that women have suffered greater employment losses through the Covid-19 pandemic than men. That was certainly true in North Carolina at the onset of the pandemic. What happened after the shutdowns may surprise you.

As North Carolina’s economy continues to recover from the recession caused by the COVID pandemic, we have reviewed the data from the U.S. Census Bureau QWI Explorer to investigate how Black / African American employment and earnings have been affected between Q1 2019 and Q1 2021.

Rising housing prices are drawing the attention of the media, homeowners, and home shoppers across the country. In North Carolina, there is a lot of talk about low housing inventories, accelerating prices, and a lack of affordable housing in urban, suburban, and rural areas.