Brookings Mountain West
About
Brookings Mountain West is a partnership between UNLV and the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution. The purpose of Brookings Mountain West is to bring the Brookings tradition of high-quality, independent, and impactful research to the issues facing the dynamic and fast-growing Intermountain West region. Building upon work at Brookings and UNLV, our community engagement and research initiatives focus on helping metropolitan areas like Las Vegas grow in robust, inclusive, and sustainable ways. Brookings Mountain West provides a platform to bring ideas and expertise together to enhance public policy discussions at the local, state, and regional level.
Accomplishments
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May. 11, 2021
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May. 10, 2021
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Apr. 13, 2021
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Mar. 8, 2021
Brookings Mountain West In the News
The big new census reports on population trends and voter turnout in 2020 each show the continuation of core underlying trends reshaping the electoral battlefield.
The battleground states across the industrial Midwest have functioned as the decisive tipping point of American politics for at least 30 years, especially in presidential elections. But the latest Census Bureau findings on both overall population growth and voter turnout in 2020 signal that the Sun Belt will increasingly rival, and potentially replace, the Rust Belt as the central battlefield in US elections.
COVID-19 pandemic woes have devastated the state labor market, particularly in tourism-reliant Southern Nevada. April 2020 marks the date Nevada’s unemployment rate hit an unprecedented 29.5%, highest in the nation at that time.
Mass shootings that result in mass casualties are almost a weekly occasion in the United States, which—not coincidentally—also has the most guns per capita in the world. Viewed from outside the U.S., it seems that Americans are not bothered by the constant deadly gun violence and have simply adapted to it. Yet, our analysis of the well-being costs of gun violence—using Twitter data to track real-time responses throughout the course of these appalling events—suggest that is not necessarily the case. We focus on the two March 2021 shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, and compare to similar data for the “1 October” (Las Vegas) and El Paso shootings a few years prior.