As COVID-19 has driven a lot of local and state policies over the last five months, the Salem Center has dedicated a large amount of our research hours to contribute to this conversation. The mission of our project has been to gather information about large areas of economic activity in Texas. We also started with Austin then expanded to the rest of the top 20 MSAs, in order to make policy recommendations about re-opening the economy with the effect of COVID-19 in mind.
Figure 1: This plot presents the relationship between Baseline Risk and percent of employees for each sector for the entire state of Texas. The magnitude of the GDP contribution is shown by the size of the marker for each industry.
One example of our research is the above example of the trade-off between employment, GDP, and the factor that we have calculated, the baseline risk. The baseline risk measure intends to capture the risks of virus spread of different activities in the absence of mitigation measures. If you would like to learn more about this measure, feel free to read out paper.
For more information on the Salem Center’s COVID research and data work, visit the Salem Center’s COVID site. This project has benefited from the wonderful and dedicated help from the research assistants in the Policy Research Laboratory.
