On this episode of Complexity Simplified, Summit Consulting Director, Frank Vetrano sits down with Mike Fratantoni, Chief Economist from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).

Summit’s Auyon Rahman breaks down the dense regulations recently published by the IRS regarding the Opportunity Zone tax benefit.

Last week, Olivia Hebner and Laura Hoesly attended the Government Analytics Breakfast Forum: Using Analytics to Combat the Opioid Crisis sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and REI Systems. The speakers included Allison Oelschlaeger (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), Dr. Mona Siddiqui (Health and Human Services), and Dr. Jim Kyung-Soo Liew (Johns Hopkins University). During the forum, speakers and audience members discussed data sources available to the federal government, challenges the government faces when analyzing the data, steps already taken, and possible methods for analyzing the data going forward.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) released new guidelines for auditing contractor compensation practices on August 24, 2018. The guidelines, Directive 2018-5, replaced Directive 307 (DIR 2013-03), which had been in place since 2013.

**Note: This post was written in September 2017.**

The hurricanes that hit Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2017 left devastating destruction in their wake, resulting in untold costs and disruptions to millions of people, businesses, and the government. The necessary response effort to address the immediate damages, related negative economic impact, and subsequent rebuilding, will use tremendous resources and exceptional diligence. This includes costs and long-run impacts that will not be realized for several years, compounded by the uncertainty around how large the impact will be on individuals, businesses, and government agencies operating in or around the affected areas.

Tree-based modeling is an excellent alternative to linear regression analysis. But what makes it so advantageous? Tree-based models:

• Can be used for any type of data, whether they are numerical (i.e. number calories in cereal) or categorical (i.e. manufacturer of cereal)
• Can handle data that are not normally distributed (normal data are symmetric, bell-shaped, and centered at the mean; however, most data do not follow this type of distribution)
• Are easy to represent visually, making a complex predictive model much easier to interpret
• Require little data preparation because variable transformations are unnecessary

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we continue our podcast series on federal credit's role in infrastructure and exports.

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we kick off our podcast series on federal credit & infrastructure.

Since 2017, Summit has been closely monitoring the opioid litigation landscape, including multi-district litigation (MDL) through various outlets. For example, we are tracking more than 30 opioid cases in the state of West Virginia. Our team calculated the supply of opioids, opioid deaths, and the impact of the opioid epidemic on state budgets through the increase of total salaries in the heavily impacted professions.¹ These professions include medical services, social services, and law enforcement services.

On this episode of Complexity Simplified, we continue our series on federal government programs.