Research

As we all know, today marks one of the clearest-cut deadlines of the year: Our Federal income taxes are due. (And, if you didn’t know, you’ve got until midnight.) Yes, the IRS does grant extensions, making it more generous than many teachers I know. But, for most of us, today is it.According to Virginia Senator […]

Urban areas import the young and export the old, the theory goes, or went. For decades, young people have come to Virginia’s urban areas to go to university or work, often moving out again when their children require more space or education, or when they retire. But, since the mid 2000s, a demographic change has slowed […]

The Weldon Cooper Center, under contract with the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC), developed and released in 2012 the most recent round of official state population projections for Virginia.  These projections, consistent with others commissioned or developed in the past by the VEC, focus primarily on trends in the number of people currently living in Virginia […]

When you sat down to fill out the 2010 Census form, what category did you choose for your relationship to the household head? Did you choose “husband or wife”? Or maybe “stepson or stepdaughter”?  “Roommate”? Did it strike you as odd that you couldn’t choose “concubine,” or “polygamous wife”? Or, better yet, did you wonder […]

As Hamilton noted when posting the map of updated Virginia Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the MSA’s are calculated with commuting statistics.  If more than 25% of workers in a locality commute to a nearby metropolitan area, that county is considered to be closely linked to it.  This is a useful cutoff point, but like all cutoffs, […]

This is one of my favorite demographic maps. It was produced by the Census Bureau to show the most commonly reported ancestry for each county in the United States in 2000. Even though the data is over 13 years old, the map remains very popular. Largest Ancestry: 2000 Since a follow-up map for 2010 has […]

The foreign-born, or immigrants, comprise more than 10% of the Commonwealth’s population.  Most of them are between 25 and 44 years of age. This young cohort is highly active both in terms of production (working) and reproduction (having children). The adult foreign-born, for example, make up 15% of the Commonwealth’s workforce; and a fifth of […]

In January, I spent some time discussing SNAP in Virginia here and here; at the time, there was a lot of hypothesizing about what kinds of changes were in store for the program.In early February, the Farm Bill was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. This bill reauthorized Federal funding to […]

Much has been made of the living preferences and economic situation of millenials.  In the current economy, most localities can expect to lose almost all of their brightest young people to college towns.  Whether these localities are able to lure these college graduates back is another story, and an important one since (many argue) it’s […]

Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) or Metro Areas are perhaps the most common way to define an urban region. Because many urban areas cross into multiple localities, such as in Hampton Roads, MSAs are frequently used in the public and private sector to understand an urban area and its suburbs. Despite the widespread usage of MSAs, […]