By Julie Verhage
Bloomberg Business
This month marks six years since the end of the U.S. recession. In those six years, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has climbed more than 200 percent from its lowest level and the national unemployment rate has almost halved from a peak of 10 percent. By these measures, the overall economy seems to be doing pretty well. But this isn’t the case for everyone. When you drill down and look at U.S. cities separately, some have fared even better while others have yet to see a recovery.
Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, senior economist at Glassdoor, crunched the numbers to come up with a “recovery index” for U.S. cities. To do this, he looked at three major trends: unemployment, the number of jobs, and wages. Combining all of these together gives us Glassdoor’s recovery index. It’s basically the sum of the decrease in the unemployment rate plus the change in total employment and the change in average hourly wages since 2009.
The higher a metropolitan area is on the index, the better its economic health, Chamberlain says. So let’s take a look at the results.
Read full coverage of the results here.