Introduction to the Data for Progress Jobs Model

In the summer of 2021, Data for Progress released a memo on the proposed Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) and the 48C Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit contained in drafts of the Build Back Better (BBB) Act, in which we made use of a technique for economic analysis known as input-output (I-O) modeling to assess the potentially synergistic effects of these two policies on GDP and job creation.

Going forward, Data for Progress is eager to make more regular use of this approach to provide the progressive policy and advocacy communities with high-quality, evidence-based estimates of the likely output and employment effects of various legislative proposals as they work their way toward enactment.

To that end, this memo serves to reintroduce the Data for Progress Jobs Model, and to provide a basic outline of our methodology as well as the results of a “backcasting” exercise in which we use our model to analyze the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. By demonstrating that our results are roughly in line with those obtained from economic studies of the ARRA by other authors, we hope to provide confidence in the practical utility and reasonableness of our approach.

Source code for this project is available on Github.

Note: This memo was updated on March 7th, 2022 to correct for an error in an earlier version.