Craig Wesley Carpenter

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Michigan State University

Purpose Publicly available datasets in the USA present data suppression issues that limit the ability to investigate entrepreneurial subgroups like military veterans, which account for about one in ten entrepreneurs in the USA. Thus, despite public desire to support veteran entrepreneurs (“vetrepreneurs”), there is a limited descriptive understandi...

Small businesses in the food and beverage service industry are particularly vulnerable to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most salient vulnerabilities was the drastic decline in consumer spending at eating and drinking places, generating unprecedented swings in employment in this service-intensive sector. Governments across the glo...

In this research note, we describe the results of the first validation study of the U.S. Census Bureau's new Community Resilience Estimates (CRE), which uses Census microdata to develop a tract-level vulnerability index for the United States. By employing administrative microdata to link Social Security Administration mortality records to CRE, we s...

The 2007 Military Lending Act attempted to ban high‐interest loans to U.S. military members and the 2017 “Final Rule” further restricted access, causing regional shocks in payday lending exposure in counties with a military base. Difference‐in‐differences and dynamic estimators provide mixed evidence on the effect of this payday lending access shoc...

We review the antiracism concept and contextualize it in Extension public policy education and the Extension system itself. Despite public policy education having a long history in Extension on a wide variety of issues, missing from this programming is the pursuit of antiracism. As a programmatic example, we review some historical causes of present...

Recent research on the restructuring of the financial industry from local banks to interstate conglomerates has raised questions about the impact on nonmetropolitan economies. In this paper, we develop two competing hypotheses and scrutinize the impact of local bank concentration (percent banks that are locally headquartered) on four measures of ec...

Extension professionals increasingly understand data as integral to economic development planning and related efforts. However, regional economic data is often inaccurate, expensive, and unengaging for stakeholders. The Economic Opportunity Mapping Tool provides industry-specific free online interactive maps to engage stakeholders in the process of...

Federal administrative data present a valuable opportunity for food and agricultural industry locational outcome research. We review issues with aggregated U.S. public data and summarize current methods. An example empirical approach combines federal administrative and secondary data. We compare results with differing levels of industrial aggregati...

We explore the structure of the U.S. retail sector by estimating county-level demand thresholds for 11 retail industries using establishment-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database and Integrated Longitudinal Business Database. In addition to providing accurate and precise demand threshold estimates at a highly disag...

U.S. Commuting Zones (CZs) are an aggregation of county-level data that researchers commonly use to create less arbitrary spatial entities and to reduce spatial autocorrelation. However, by further aggregating data, researchers lose point data and the associated detail. Thus, the choice between using counties or CZs often remains subjective with in...

Recent research indicates a substantial decline in the number of local banks over the past 40 years. This decline has been particularly stark in rural areas, though it extends across the rural–urban spectrum. An associated decline in relational lending is hypothesized to drive a reduction in several indicators of rural resilience. Given the associa...

Rural–urban linkages have long been recognized as a potential rural economic development strategy. This article tests the potential effects of rural–urban linkages created through rural food manufacturing, tourism, and data processing centers on rural per capita income, employment, and population between 2009 and 2016. Using unique spatial interact...

Interactions between transportation and warehousing and other industry clusters are not widely explored and the determinants of logistics locational determinants is limited in the U.S. context. These gaps in the literature, along with the U.S. transportation and warehousing sector's decentralization from urban areas and concentration in regions, hi...

A frequent theme in regional science is exploring the determinants of business establishment locations. We briefly review the theoretical perspectives motivating several frameworks underpinning locational determinant analyses. We summarize and review trade-offs involved in established and emerging econometric techniques that researchers use to anal...

Estimates of publicly suppressed and unrevised regional economic data produce error and potentially bias statistical inference. This article estimates measurement error in suppressed cell estimated datasets (SCEDs) relative to unsuppressed federal administrative data. In a cross section, coefficient estimates based on relatively aggregated SCEDs ar...

Business location research often focuses on evaluating specific policies or explaining outcomes for a particular region. Further, the micro-foundations of random profit maximization supporting manufacturing location analysis often lack the intuitive nature of demand thresholds. While this article maintains these micro-foundations, it introduces a u...

We model the locational determinants of nine categories of healthcare services in the contiguous United States using restricted access federal establishment data. These data enable close examination of rural health services, which are subject to suppression in publicly published data sources. After reviewing differences in public and unsuppressed r...

Population studies show the importance of active aging for maintaining cognitive health, but much of the research has focused on episodic memory and verbal skills. Aging and ability to make rational intertemporal financial decisions is less understood, despite its critical role in consumer finance. This study describes the relationship between age,...

Access to financial capital is vital for the sustainability of the local business sector. Recent research on the restructuring of the financial industry from local owned banks to interstate conglomerates has raised questions about the impact on local economies, especially in rural areas. We examine the impact of bank ownership concentration on busi...

Access to financial capital is vital for the sustainability of the local business sector. Recent research on the restructuring of the financial industry from local owned banks to interstate conglomerates has raised questions about the impact on local economies, especially in rural areas. We examine the impact of bank ownership concentration on busi...

The expansion of ethnic minorities evokes policy debate about their impact on the local economy, driving a need to measure their effects. This article introduces a spatial econometrics approach to Deller et al.’s expansion of the Carlino-Mills growth model. We employ the confidential US Census data to investigate drivers of local economic performan...

Background Remaining in the workforce in later life may be based on financial need, role fulfillment or opportunities for social participation. Employment can also provide intellectual stimulation, including the use of everyday math skills. Normal age-related decline in numeracy performance has been documented, but the role of retirement in the cap...

This article uses 127,000 observations from three confidential Census microdata sets at the individual firm and establishment level to investigate Latino-owned business survival. The merged microdata allows us to control for a wide array of personal, business, and regional characteristics. The analysis is based on hazard model. Relative to base cat...

This article uses over 100,000 observations from limited-access and nationally representative US Census Bureau microdata sets to test determinants of employment growth among Latino-owned businesses (LOBs) in the Unites States. We draw variables from prior studies on determinants business growth in the general population and uniquely apply them to L...

Researchers and citizens alike question the long-term impacts of the shale oil boom on local communities. Studies have considered the boom’s effects on employment, income, mobility, and human capital acquisition. This research specifically builds on research considering shale effects on secondary schooling. Using county-level data from Texas, we in...

Growth of the U.S. Latino population translates into policy interest of how business owner, firm, and local characteristics may be different for Latinos. To explore ethnicity and business ownership, this study merges restricted-access data from 11 million businesses. Multinomial logistic regression estimates how characteristics associate with the p...

We employ U.S. Census Bureau data from cities of 10,000 or more to examine the impact of immigrants in American cities on self-employment and median income. The results show that self-employment has a statistically significant and positive impact on median income and immigrant population. When controlling for race populations, lagged immigrant popu...

This paper employs the Michigan Census Research Data Center to merge three limited-access Census Bureau data sets by individual firm and establishment level to investigate the factors associated with the Latino-owned Business (LOB) location and dynamics over time. The three main LOB outcomes under analysis are as follows: (1) the probability of a b...