“I think it’s important to take, whenever these announcements occur, with a huge grain of salt, because there is no guarantee that those promised number will actually come to pass for any number of legitimate reasons,” said John Quinterno, a visiting professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. The new Economic Development Grant Report from the state Department of Commerce breaks down the most significant incentive dangled to entice companies to choose North Carolina: the Job Development Investment grants. Michael Walden, an economist and a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University, developed the formula the state has been using to determine those incentive packages for 20 years.