The price of a new home is greater if the land to put it on costs more. In many U.S. metropolitan areas, this generates the widely acknowledged equity concern that low- to moderate-income households spend disproportionately on housing. But high residential land prices translating into high single-family home prices may also generate the efficiency concern of discouraging new workers’ entry into such

Using U.S. Census data for the period 2010 to 2016, for 383 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and 3,137 counties nationwide, the authors examine the relationship between housing affordability and business growth in three industrial sectors: Retail, Information, and Professional Services. Housing affordability is measured by the percentage of cost-burdened homeowners and renters, defined as the

Communities worldwide are increasingly introducing regulatory measures to protect independent businesses from chain stores, but the efficacy of these attempts is largely debated. Moreover, effects are likely to vary by the characteristics of the local economy, a consideration overlooked by existing studies. Using a sample of U.S. cities with unique community characteristics, the authors examine Formula

Do motion picture incentives nudge productions to film in an adopting state, increase budgets, or hire more cast and filmmakers? Or do they simply subsidize productions that would have occurred regardless? Using California’s Film and Television Tax Credit Program, the author exploits incentives given out by lottery to answer these questions. The author finds that 19% of films would have filmed in California

While much of the economic development literature attempts to quantify the effectiveness of tax incentives on growth outcomes, less attention has been paid to the relationships between incentive use and local economic base composition, despite the fact that many economic development strategies are aimed at changing industrial base makeup. Local industrial base diversity has implications for the pace

The authors investigate the training choices made by workers entering the Trade Adjustment Assistance program and their postexit outcomes. This is important as more workers enter these types of programs due to technological change and globalization. Their study shows that workers that choose a training occupation beyond their skill level (skill overshooting) achieve higher earnings ($615 annually)

The authors take up two questions that have not been explored in research on enterprise zones. First, does a considerably longer-run perspective on the effects of state enterprise zones lead to different answers? And second, are there heterogeneous effects of enterprise zones that depend on the set of incentives these programs offer, which can vary widely? The results indicate that whether state enterprise

Research suggests dependence on natural resource development leads to decreases in per capita income, increases in inequality, and elevated poverty. Natural resource development generally takes two forms—extractive (e.g., oil and gas, mining, timber) and nonextractive (e.g., tourism, recreation, real estate). However, research has rarely examined both in tandem. Drawing on the concept of dependence

The authors analyze the locations of property tax abatements awarded to businesses in Cook County, Illinois from 2012 to 2014 to explore their spatial distribution and to examine local government motivations for awarding incentives. The authors’ analysis, which controls for the spatial distribution of businesses, reveals a clustering of abatements at intramunicipal geographic scales. They also find

Economists have devoted much attention to understanding the effects of state–local fiscal policies, particularly taxes, on the growth of state-level employment. However, no one has investigated whether the effects differ by wage level. Using a state-level panel data set, the authors investigate the link between state–local taxes and the growth of employment for three wage-level categories. The authors

There is currently a severe shortage of teachers in the U.S. workforce. The problem is especially acute among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers and exacerbated by high turnover among new teachers—those with less than 5 years of teaching experience. In this article, the authors investigate one piece of the puzzle. The authors model a social cognitive approach to understanding

Despite substantial funding going to regional economic development programs, little is known about the benefits of some of the smaller, place-based programs. The authors extend the literature on regional commissions by analyzing the economic gains to the Delta Regional Authority (DRA). The DRA was founded in 2000 to provide enhanced development aid to 252 lower Mississippi Valley counties. Using data

This research examines the distribution of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and soft-skill competencies in occupations within regional economies in the United States. This research explores the public policy question: Do occupational competencies offer a better measure of regional human capital than the commonly used metric of educational attainment? Policy makers at all levels

A generation ago, American state and local experiments with worker and community ownership appeared unsuccessful. Does their current revival offer anything new to the field of economic development or is this merely a tired retread of a failed idea? Using historical analysis, case studies, and interview data from three U.S. regions, the author analyzes the current range of initiatives that seek to remove

This article presents the spatial patterns of general and high-tech start-up rates and explores regional factors associated with entrepreneurship in U.S. micropolitan areas. Regression results show that general entrepreneurship in these small cities is predicted by population growth, the middle-age population group, the presence of small businesses, and natural amenities. Additionally, high-tech start-up

Policies affecting cultural assets are popular yet imperfectly understood tools to shape local economic development. Historic preservation policies, for example, can have markedly different implications for original residents, prospective residents, and developers, even in the same city. Therefore, merely identifying its average effect can obscure important heterogeneity in its impact. This study examines

But my fourth and final concern is the most compelling. While Baldwin is clearly an advocate for globalization, he does warn the reader about some of its potential hazards and he even offers some policy prescriptions, usually recognizing the key role of large cities as information and service hubs, which might benefit the slow-growth G7 nations. However, ever since the recession of 2007 to 2009, but

Over the past two decades, states and cities implemented low-carbon energy development, renewable portfolio standards, demand-side management (DSM), renewable energy production incentives, green building requirements, regional carbon trading agreements, and other energy-based economic development initiatives. Yet the dearth of state-level and substate-level models makes it difficult to predict the

Rising globalization denotes the widening and deepening of interdependencies among the world’s sovereign states, where the very natures of once distinctive economic, political, and social systems become transformed by the crossborder movement of goods, services, monies, ideas, technologies, and people. In a narrower sense, this process denotes the sustained integration of economic agents across space

Local economic development programs are primarily aimed at increasing employment and tax revenues. Data on these programs are collected through self-report surveys conducted by the International City Managers Association and others. This study evaluates predictors of accurate self-reporting. Using agency theory as a theoretical framework, the study measures the quantity of internal reporting components

Zhang (2015) and Lambert and Coomes (2001) have studied the Louisville Enterprise Zone (EZ) program and drawn different conclusions. This Forum/Letter to the Editor unpacks the differences in both studies by first exploring the structure and implementation of a state EZ program and various factors affecting EZ outcome measures. Methodologically, it is crucial to control for these factors to avoid biases

Evaluating the effectiveness of government programs is an important topic for economic developers. One popular example is the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) Public Works Program, initially established in 1965. Haughwout (1999) found a significant positive impact of EDA public works projects completed in 1990 on county-level employment over the period 1990 to 1994. The authors reexamine

Zhang wrote that the Louisville enterprise zone (EZ) was more successful than what previous research showed and that variations in research design have led to conflicting or mixed reviews of many local economic development policies that are based on the EZ concept. She mentions a study and an article on the Louisville, Kentucky EZ and implies the time horizon used to evaluate it was too short. This

This study examines the role of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and collaborative engagement on the performance of rural economic development organizations. The authors theorize that an organization’s EO and collaborative engagement, determined by levels of active engagement within a regional collaboration network, impact its ability to accomplish its goals, satisfy its stakeholders, and influence

The authors analyze the effects of property tax abatement on the property tax base and rates of school districts within a municipality offering the abatement using data from Franklin County, Ohio, one of the most populous counties in the United States. An increase in a school district’s Community Reinvestment Area abatement intensity correlates with (a) a decrease in the mill rate for real property

Economic development has assumed enlarged importance in public postsecondary education in recent decades. In fact, efforts to harness academic functions for statewide economic growth have been accentuated to such a degree that some consider the mission to be the fourth pillar of public higher education. Yet the extent to which economic development has been adopted as a central administrative feature

The authors model how state business incentives influence interstate relocation patterns of manufacturers using a panel (2000-2011) of 32 states. The National Establishment Time Series database and the Panel Database on Incentives and Taxes are used to study relocation by manufacturing establishments based on differences between the origin and destination states. The authors find that traditional factors

How important are market potential and fiscal incentives for firms’ location decisions? We estimate the influence of subsidies and tax breaks on the decisions of firms to relocate or to remain in a certain U.S. county using a structural economic geography model developed in Meurers and Moenius (2018). In a panel data set from 1990 to 2016 for almost 3,000 U.S. counties, the authors find a strong and

State tax and nontax incentives have been widespread in the United States, though their efficacy in job creation and economic development has been repeatedly questioned in the literature by scholars and policy makers. Why, then, do states persistently pursue these incentive policies? Using the newly developed Panel Database on Incentives and Taxes, we adopt a dynamic spatial Durbin panel model to account

U.S. states often cite the acceleration of start-up activity as a rationale for the research and development (R&D) tax credit. While a strong empirical base links the R&D tax credit to increased innovation, prior work provides no causal evidence that the credit effects the rate of formation and growth potential of new businesses. This article combines data from the Startup Cartography Project with

Even as economic incentives are increasingly used by policy makers to spur state and local economic development, their use is controversial among the public and academics. The authors examine whether state and local incentives lead to higher rates of business start-ups in metropolitan counties. Existing research indicates that start-ups are important for supporting (net) job creation, long-term growth

This special issue of Economic Development Quarterly (EDQ) focuses on state and local financial incentives, provided to businesses to spur state or local economic development. EDQ made a public request for papers on the causes or effects of incentives. Selected authors participated in an Upjohn Institute researchers’ workshop. Submitted papers went through the journal’s normal referee process. What