In White men may be biggest winners when a city snags Amazon’s HQ2, Dillon Mahmoudi and I use our research to examine the potential gender and race effects of Amazon’s HQ2 on host cities.
“Cities have long been known for “smokestack chasing,” or offering lucrative tax incentives and other subsidies to lure companies or factories from elsewhere. These policies often don’t work.
You might call today’s race to get Amazon’s second headquarters a modern form of that phenomenon as municipalities compete in a zero-sum game for tech company outposts.
Yet all of the presumed economic benefits are problematically predicated on the companies’ continued growth, which is never a sure thing. The negative impacts, however, are much more certain.”