Caroline Koch MPP/MBA Candidate, Heller School for Social Policy and Management

Caroline Koch is a dual Master’s in Public Policy and Master’s in Business Administration student at the Heller School at Brandeis University. She currently works at Brandeis’ Institute on Assets and Social Policy, where she is part of a team investigating the labor market impacts on the Boston Hyatt Hotel workers that were unexpectedly fired in 2009. In the summer of 2015, Caroline was a Harvard Kennedy School Rappaport Public Policy Fellow for the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development. Prior to attending the Heller School, Caroline worked with MassINC, a non-profit think tank that supports the growth of Massachusetts’ midsized post-industrial cities. Caroline earned her BA in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and currently resides in Somerville, MA.

ARTICLES By Caroline Koch

Week 5: E-Over-P

Despite the wall-to-wall coverage, one fact about the early primary states you probably didn’t pick up is that they’ve both got nice looking employment-to-population ratios. The E/P ratio measures the proportion of the state’s working-age population (ages 16 to 64) that is employed. Since the Great Recession, economists have been tracking this measure closely because

Week 4: The Geography of Growth

In recent weeks, we’ve looked at the remarkable pace of job growth in Massachusetts and noted that this encouraging job creation performance came without gains in labor productivity or real wages. Now we add more nuance to the story with a series of maps indicating where jobs were added by industry. The first map shows

Week 3: Growth without growth

Last week we looked at the impressive job creation performance of the Massachusetts economy during the first half of the 2010s. Relatively to past decades, even the celebrated 1980s, we’ve been humming along producing jobs at record levels. This week we contrast job growth with output growth. Because comparable data are only available through 2014,

The Gateway Cities Vision for Dynamic Community-Wide Learning Systems

Developed collaboratively with Gateway City mayors, managers, and education leaders, this vision highlights effective new models to prepare students for the changing economy and ensure an adequate supply of skilled workers for growing regional economies across the Commonwealth. The Vision also calls for strategies that leverage the educational assets of our urban centers so that

MassINC’s Middle Class Index

The first-of-its-kind Middle Class Index is designed to serve as a barometer of the status of middle class residents. Composed of 26 different indicators, the overall score for Massachusetts in 2010 was 97.4, down 2.6 points from the benchmark figure of 100 for the year 2000. Nationally, the index number was 94.2. The index number

Going for Growth: New Education-Housing Partnerships to Stabilize Families and Boost Student Achievement

Going for Growth: New Education-Housing Partnerships to Stabilize Families and Boost Student Achievement, the fourth brief in a series exploring policy innovations to spur reinvestment and renewal in the state’s key regional cities. Extensive research documents the negative consequences that student mobility – the churn of youth entering and exiting classrooms during the school year

The 80 Percent Challenge

A Survey of Climate Change Opinion and Action in Massachusetts

This report, made possible with generous support from the Barr Foundation, represents the first in-depth look at how Massachusetts residents perceive the problem posed by global warming, as well as their willingness to embrace efforts to address this unprecedented challenge. With the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008, Massachusetts became one of the first states

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