This article outlines a practical standard of university economic impact analyses for small colleges. The needs of small colleges greatly differ from those of large universities, as they are typically dependent on in-house resources to conduct economic impact analyses. These financial limitations create a need for suitable, publicly available data that can substitute for primary, costly data collection

The consensus view that discriminatory barriers limit the size and scope of America’s minority-business community is factually well-grounded. Rarely examined, however, is the question of why these firms are flourishing. The authors examine the scope of this growth and its causes. The process of selectively reducing discriminatory barriers inhibiting minority entrepreneurship’s development began in

Land-use regulations can restrict urban growth by increasing housing costs. This article investigates the heterogeneous effects of land-use regulations among different racial groups. It uses U.S. Census Bureau data from 202 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2010 to investigate how land-use regulations affect changes in the share of African Americans in response to local economic demand. The research

This study assesses the efficacy of the Small Business Innovation Research Program on innovation, employment, and business formation in small and nonmetropolitan counties. The primary goal is to further understand rural innovation and growth process through government intervention on small business development. Using panel data and employing fixed-effect models, the results suggest that, compared with

In this study, the present a statistically valid typology of high-growth firms (HGFs), also known as gazelles, to determine if payroll and job growth patterns differ between groups or clusters. Cluster–discriminant analysis was conducted on a cohort of 26,104 HGFs s in Ohio, using data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages from 2010 to 2015. Only 1.2% of all Ohio’s firms can be classified

How much does economic development policy matter? Can it catalyze a region’s economic transformation? Or is it more often the case that a region happens to be lucky or unlucky, depending on whether its historical endowments match well with national economic trends?

Ben Armstrong compares the implementation of regional economic development programs in the Pittsburgh and Cleveland metropolitan statistical areas during the 1980s. He argues that their regional economies and research institutions were then similar. He contends that the transformational policy difference occurred when Pennsylvania’s governor mandated that the presidents of Pittsburgh’s research universities

There is a large literature examining the effect of taxes and tax concessions on local economic development. The last comprehensive review of taxes and economic development, however, was Wasylenko’s review in 1997, which mostly examined the location response of firms. Subsequent to the last major review of the literature, empirical work in this area sought to address endogeneity concerns that plagued

Benjamin Armstrong’s article compares state economic development policies in Pittsburgh and Cleveland in the 1980s, the period of major regional economic restructuring. Armstrong argues that what separated Pittsburgh from Cleveland in the ensuring years was the state-mandated inclusion of the city’s universities as major economic development decision makers and the role that advanced technology played

State and local governments frequently invest in policies aimed at stimulating the growth of new industries, but studies of industrial policy and related economic development initiatives cast doubt on their effectiveness. This article examines the role of state-level industrial policies in contributing to the different economic trajectories of two U.S. metro areas—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland

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