News
Income inequality in Kentucky has grown significantly since 1979 and Fayette County is among the counties with the greatest inequality, says a study released last week by the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
In Lexington/Fayette County, the average income of the top 1 percent was nearly 20 times higher than that of the remaining population — with the average income of the top 1 percent in Fayette County at $860,607 and the bottom 9 percent with $43,553.
Excerpt from article published on 12 Dec. 2016 by Courtney Balestier. For full article, click here.
Lexington, Ky. (WKYT) - The 27th annual economic outlook conference took place this morning at the Lexington Convention Center where experts say the forecast for this year is looking good.
"We're looking at the same numbers and we're drawing the same conclusions, which is that fundamentally the economy looks strong," says Chris Bollinger.
Bollinger is the Director for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky. Bollinger was one of five guest speakers at the conference. He says Kentucky's 2016 outlook is looking good.
This issue brief explores the links between obstacles students face and educational outcomes.
A positive relationship exists between educational attainment and earnings, which has been well established in the literature through multiple studies. This, in turn, influences the revenues generated for the state of Kentucky through the personal income tax. We predict even the modest change of increasing Associate’s and Bachelor’s degree holders by 1% would increase revenue by $37 million. Kentucky loses between $300 million and $500 million in state tax revenues every year because our educational attainment is lower than the national average.
Crime impacts the lives of Kentuckians in myriad ways. It has direct costs to victims and indirect costs through property values and business activity. Citizens and policymakers alike desire to reduce and limit crime. In this brief, we investigate the link between crime rates in Kentucky’s counties and the aggregate level of education. Perhaps surprisingly, higher education, and specifically the percent of the population with a Bachelor’s degree, is associated with lower crime. We find that increasing educational attainment in Kentucky to the U.S.
The health of the people of Kentucky is of high concern for policymakers and citizens alike. Individuals want to live healthy, productive lives, while policymakers recognize that chronic illnesses cost the state in myriad ways. In this brief, we examine the link between educational attainment and health outcomes. We focus on two groups of health outcomes. The first are behavioral and include choices: tobacco use, alcohol use, obesity, and exercise. The second group are outcomes highly associated with these behaviors: heart attack, angina, stroke, and diabetes.
Two of the largest federal transfer programs are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Federal expenditures on SNAP exceeded $74 billion in 2014, and SSI exceeded $3 billion. While these programs provide families in distress with important support, ideally we desire that Kentucky families would not require this kind of assistance. In 2014, over 800,000 Kentuckians received SNAP assistance each month while over 190,000 received SSI.
The Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) (Gatton College, University of Kentucky) was commissioned by Kentucky’s Council for Postsecondary Education to examine the implications of education across the Kentucky economy. This study used data on Kentuckians from the American Community Survey (ACS), the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The focus on Kentucky is unique, as most studies of this kind have used only national data.
