UPDATE: A previous version of this article referenced an out-of-date unemployment report. Georgia’s unemployment rate has now dropped below 8 percent.
Atlanta News, Weather, Traffic, and Sports | FOX 5
With Georgia gubernatorial candidates Nathan Deal and Jason Carter drawing lines in the sand on job growth, Georgians are left to navigate two different stories.
Carter points to the unemployment rate (a tick below 8 percent) as an example of Deal’s failures in office. Deal points to documented job growth as the ultimate success.
Goizueta Business School lecturer Ray Hill spoke with Fox5 Atlanta to help make sense of the opposing view points.
“When the economy improves, people come back into the labor force,” he said. “That can drive up the unemployment rate because you have more people looking for work who haven’t found jobs yet.”
Hill also told reporter Tom Haynes that, regardless of candidate or platform, it’s difficult for a governor to make a short-term impact on unemployment.
About Ray Hill
Raymond Hill joined Goizueta Business School in 2003 and teaches managerial economics and finance. Hill began his academic career by teaching economics at Princeton University, before leaving in 1982 to become an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. His work at Lehman included a seven year stay in Hong Kong as managing director of its investment banking business in Asia outside of Japan. Hill returned to his native Georgia in 1993 and worked for ten years at Mirant Corporation and its predecessor, a subsidiary of Southern Company. During that time he served as the company’s chief financial officer, except for an eighteen month stint as a CEO of one of the largest independent power companies in Asia, which was owned by Southern. Hill earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his PhD in economics from MIT. He also studied at the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva under the Fulbright Fellowship program.
