"A new study from the Federal Reserve looks directly at your question and tries to answer it, and I think gives a very optimistic answer," says Dr. Walden, a professor of agricultural and resource economics. "And that is that job losses during recessions have actually gotten smaller. So the job market has actually performed better recently during recessions than previously.

"And this study looked at all states and found that job losses in all states, including those in North Carolina, follow that pattern. So that's the good news," he adds. "Now the bad news is that this moderation in job losses has been less in North Carolina than in the majority of other states -- so another way of saying that other states have seen a better improvement in the job situation during recessions in recent years than has North Carolina.

"And I think that's probably overwhelmingly due to our particular economic structure, [with] so much of our economic structure being related to industries like textiles, apparel and furniture that have been adversely affected by economic trends," he adds. "But the good news here is that, yes, it could have been worse we could have had more job losses in recessions than we actually did."