Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke recently gave this speech at an awards ceremony of the Charlotte, NC chamber of commerce. His remarks provide an interesting overview of the great challenges and transformations experienced by the region’s economy in recent years, including the decline of textile manufacturing and the explosive growth of professional and business services, [...]

LesLe: A repository of resources on community and economic development compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Some interesting highlights:

 HUD’s Office of University Partnerships
NGA’s Growth and Quality of Life Toolkit
USDA’s Rural Development Success Stories

From “Firms of a Feather Flock Together,” an article on new research from Washington University in St. Louis:
“High-tech firms locating close to each other benefit from the proximity,” says Barak S. Aharonson, visiting assistant professor of organization and strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. “The potential for frequent face-to-face [...]

The Idaho Division of Professional-Technical Education participates in the States’ Career Cluster Initiative to improve student engagement, learning outcomes, and secondary-postsecondary linkages while making efficient use of teaching resources.
The agency disseminates a number of useful career cluster materials on its web site, including labor market data organized by cluster, which is produced using EMSI’s Strategic [...]

This document is a short working paper produced jointly by Central Arizona College and EMSI/CCbenefits Inc. It describes data sources and research methods to help colleges determine a region’s labor market needs and adjust programs accordingly.
Download the full document here (PDF hosted by Central Arizona College).

EMSI/CCbenefits has just completed a major study of the socioeconomic impact of Maryland’s community colleges, commissioned by the Maryland Association of Community Colleges. The project included individual studies for 14 participating institutions, in addition to an aggregate report highlighting the impact of the system as a whole.
While EMSI’s policy is not to release specific results [...]

UPDATE: See even more client snapshots here.
Current and prospective clients sometimes ask EMSI how their peers are using Strategic Advantage. To help with this knowledge-sharing, we’re pleased to publish a handful of customer experiences that demonstrate some of the real-world solutions enabled by Strategic Advantage (SA) in the fields of economic development, workforce investment, and [...]