California Competitiveness Research
The Rose Institute has conducted numerous studies of state and local government institutions, with the goal of promoting good governance. In recent years, we have devoted considerable attention to this area.
Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey
The Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey, the Rose Institute’s longest-running project, directly addresses the topic of California’s competitiveness. For more than twenty years, the Rose Institute has collaborated with the Kosmont Companies to publish these surveys. The project is designed to collect city-level data on taxes, fees, and other variables that affect business costs, and to compare cities based on their relative cost of doing business.
Business Migration Out of California
In partnership with CMC’s Lowe Institute, the Rose Institute has a license to use the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) Database, which includes information collected by Dun & Bradstreet from 1990-2021 on millions of business establishments across the United States, including their location, number of employees, and sales.
Rose Institute students used NETS data to create dynamic maps of net business migration between all states in the U.S. in 1990 and 2019. The maps dramatically highlighted the sharp increase in net business migration out of California in the later period and were incorporated as a part of the 2022 Kosmont-Rose Institute Cost of Doing Business Survey.
