Stephan Weiler

Stephan Weiler
Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Economics

PhD (UC-Berkeley), MA (Stanford), BA/Honors (Stanford)

About

107
Publications
20,906
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1,949
Citations
Introduction
Stephan Weiler is a Professor of Economics at Colorado State University specializing in urban, rural, and regional economic development.
Additional affiliations
August 1996 - July 2019
Colorado State University
Position
  • Managing Director

Publications

Publications (107)
Article
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...
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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress in conjunction with the Small Business Administration (SBA) created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to help small business owners retain employees. We improve on previous literature exploring the relationship between bank density and PPP loan dispersion by implementing precisely geocoded data to...
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This paper sheds light on regional recovery prospects from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) crisis by examining the link between gross rates of establishment openings and closures and local economic growth spanning the 2001 recession and the 2007–2009 global financial crisis (GFC). Consistent with existing literature, our results show that U...
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This paper develops a spatial econometric model of transportation mode choice and tests the association between zoning and other built environment variables and the choice of auto and non-auto transportation. We provide an extensive review of spatial econometrics and demonstrate the importance of using models that treat space formally when investig...
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The Paycheck Protection Program was a highly unusual policy measure enacted to provide bridge capital to support small businesses coping with the dramatic downturn in demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By design, the program effectively required potential applicants to work through the bank with whom they had a relationship. Yet large swathes of...
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With the economic upheaval brought by COVID-19, it was very difficult to understand economic events as they unfolded in real time, during unprecedented pandemic conditions. Since existing methods did not adequately address the rapid changes to the economy on a statewide basis, we felt compelled to create a novel approach to (a) bring current critic...
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This paper explores the role of local labor market dynamics on the survival of new businesses. The characteristics of the local labor market are likely to influence the survival of new businesses, the level of entrepreneurship, and the resilience of the regional economy. We apply portfolio theory to evaluate employment-based and income-based measur...
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Using data on the composition of the banking sector for U.S. counties, we explore two channels through which banking composition may impact county-level development outcomes: a direct channel through employer establishments, and an indirect channel through a county’s resilience to macroeconomic shocks. An increase in community bank presence has a d...
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As prison populations have increased, states have often turned to private prisons in an effort to save on correctional costs. This paper first considers the trade‐offs between private and public prisons, then assesses the cost‐effectiveness of such strategies across all 50 states over 1999–2015 using a fixed‐effects panel model. We find that privat...
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This paper shows that brownfield redevelopment occurs at a lower than socially optimal rate due to a stigma effect. A theoretical framework is employed, incorporating asymmetric information showing this stigma within the brownfields market generates a first-mover problem. Developers require a risk premium on their rate of return to offset this stig...
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Since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) last revisited its wildlife strike disclosure policy in 2009, the American domestic airline industry has undergone a significant increase in concentration. We analyze how the aforementioned shift in market structure has impacted the voluntary repair cost disclosure of US airlines following a damaging...
Article
About one-fifth of the total housing stock in Detroit, Michigan is vacant, blighted or abandoned. Abandoned homes are particularly vulnerable to arson, with an estimated 20 such structures set ablaze each day. In 2011 the Fire Commissioner of Detroit announced a policy of fire non-suppression for abandoned structures. The policy is referred to as “...
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Urban agglomeration is an important correlate to regional innovation. Large population centers pool knowledge workers and facilitate spillovers essential to innovative activity. And large populations provide more cost-effective locations for non-labor inputs to innovation, including local infrastructure that may facilitate innovative activity. Howe...
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We apply farm-level data to a two-stage model to explore how three different theories of comparative advantage influence the propensity of a farm or ranch to adopt an agritourism enterprise and the level of economic activity tied to that enterprise. Findings suggest that a county’s entrepreneurial spirit and scenic byways increase the propensity to...
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This article explores whether greater levels of national defence spending effectively push women away from research careers in science and engineering due to the biases that defence spending can foster in research and development (R&D) institutions. Defence R&D spending shapes the orientation of R&D both through the direct subsidisation of R&D, as...
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Information is an essential input to the entrepreneurial process. Information based on the trials of past entrepreneurial projects can be particularly useful as it reveals details about the local market, benefiting subsequent ventures. Through a formal model of entrepreneurial search characterized by information flows and networks, we hypothesize a...
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Although international immigrations’ impacts on domestic workers are well studied in the United States, data paucity means most researchers have yet to isolate the specific effects of undocumented immigration. Despite limited empirical evidence, many policymakers presuppose undocumented immigrants adversely impact native workers to justify stringen...
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Lead is a neurotoxin with developmentally harmful effects in children. In the United States, over half the current flow of lead into the atmosphere is attribut- able to lead-formulated aviation gasoline (avgas), used in a large fraction of piston- engine aircraft. Various public interest firms have petitioned the EPA to find endan- germent from and...
Chapter
The relationship between the rate of business formation and growth has long been a widely accepted but empirically nearly-neglected foundation in economics. Regional economic analysis creates the possibility of a tractable geographic scope to better capture this relationship. Along with the more recent availability of regional data with the necessa...
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This paper examines the effect of provincial characteristics on regional entrepreneurship growth in rapidly-evolving Vietnam. Combining theoretical endogenous growth models with spatially-explicit econometric techniques, a sequential series of regressions are run for the 63 provinces of Vietnam across the period of 2005 to 2013. The key findings ar...
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We investigate the accuracy of facility-reported data both within and across emissions and off-site transfer inventories of lead (Pb) in time. We build on recent work using Benford’s Law to detect statistical anomalies in large data sets. Our application exploits a regulatory experiment to test for systematic changes in firm behavior triggered by t...
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We examine the contribution to economic growth of entrepreneurial marketplace information within a regional endogenous growth framework. Entrepreneurs are posited to provide an input to economic growth through the information revealed by their successes and failures. We empirically identify this information source with the regional variation in est...
Article
Disaster damage levels are matched to county-level nonprofit activity indicators. Using dynamic panel-data estimation, nonprofit net assets (and nonprofit revenue to a lesser extent) defined at this local level are found to be positively correlated with disaster event damage levels, consistent with a post-disaster giving mechanism. Magnitudes are r...
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The majority of research documenting the public health impacts of natural disasters focuses on the well-being of adults and their living children. Negative effects may also occur in the unborn, exposed to disaster stressors when critical organ systems are developing and when the consequences of exposure are large. We exploit spatial and temporal va...
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Rural and urban regions are interconnected and form one system. Changes in one region therefore also affect others. This is particularly true for a force as large and pervasive as urbanization which resulted in massive rural and urban economic restructuring and geographic realignment of rural–urban boundaries. Until the mid-twentieth century, rural...
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Objectives: We analyzed singleton births to determine the relationship between birth weight and altitude exposure. Methods: We analyzed 715,213 singleton births across 74 counties from the western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2000....
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Hurricane Andrew, which made landfall on August 24, 1992, was one of the most destructive hurricanes in American history, causing atypically high levels of psychological and physical health impairment among the resident population and especially among vulnerable groups. This article investigates whether maternal exposure to Hurricane Andrew during...
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We first review Andy’s lessons to us on the potential contributions of storytelling in regional science. We then review Andy’s lessons on how measurement and definitions affect regional science research by focusing on Andy’s and our own work. We see this research through the lens of measurement and offer our suggestions for what is next.
Article
Casualties from natural disasters may depend on the day of the week they strike. With data from the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States (SHELDUS), daily variation in hurricane and tornado casualties from 5,043 tornado and 2,455 hurricane time/place events is analyzed. Hurricane forecasts provide at-risk populations with...
Article
Comparing local employment portfolios against entrepreneurship, this research finds that local wage and salary job market prospects shape incentives for potential entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship may thus be more attractive in areas featuring high employment risk and/or low returns. This research contributes to the existing regional employment portf...
Article
In New Orleans a strong inverse association was previously identified between community soil lead and 4th grade school performance. This study extends the association to zinc, cadmium, nickel, manganese, copper, chromium, cobalt, and vanadium in community soil and their comparative effects on 4th grade school performance. Adjusting for poverty, foo...
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Retail business development is a broad goal for both private business interests as well as local policymakers, yet the goal of retail opportunities for local residents themselves is often seen as secondary. This paper considers the argument that retail opportunities and sense of community are in fact linked in important ways, links that reinforce t...
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We investigate the relationship between maternal exposure to benzene and birth weight outcomes for resident births in the United States in 1996 and 1999, taking advantage of a natural experiment afforded by the regulation of benzene content of gasoline in various American cities. Regression results show that a unit increase (μg/m(3)) in maternal ex...
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It is widely recognized that small business is not only an important source of employment but is the genesis of virtually all successful large enterprises. Given their size and characteristic opaqueness, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) tend to be more financially constrained than large firms because of the lack of access to external financing f...
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Public land designations have been shown to have significant impact on their contextual regional economies. This paper reviews the existing literature on how public lands impact the proximate regional economies in which they are situated. Based on this collected wisdom the paper synthesizes past lessons into a comprehensive impact methodology. This...
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Cities regularly face a wide range of economic development choices that inevitably create both winners and losers within their communities. Proper assessment of the impacts of such choices requires not only an appropriate modelling framework but also explicit understanding and incorporation of a city's income distribution priorities. This paper pro...
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Previous studies identified a curvilinear association between aggregated blood lead (BL) and soil lead (SL) data in New Orleans census tracts. In this study we investigate the relationships between SL (mg/kg), age of child, and BL (μg/dL) of 55,551 children in 280 census tracts in metropolitan New Orleans, 2000 to 2005. Analyses include random effe...
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We investigate the relationship between exposure to Hurricanes Katrina and/or Rita and mental health resilience by vulnerability status, with particular focus on the mental health outcomes of single mothers versus the general public. We advance a measurable notion of mental health resilience to disaster events. We also calculate the economic costs...
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Logistic regression and spatial analytic techniques are used to model fetal distress risk as a function of maternal exposure to Hurricane Andrew. First, monthly time series compare the proportion of infants born distressed in hurricane affected and unaffected areas. Second, resident births are analyzed in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, before, du...
Article
Prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (HKR), significant associations were noted between soil lead (SL) and blood lead (BL) in New Orleans. Engineering failure of New Orleans levees and canal walls after HKR set the stage for a quasi-experiment to evaluate BL responses by 13 306 children to reductions in SL. High density soil surveying conducted in...
Article
Although scholars have long emphasized the importance of entrepreneurs to long-term growth prospects, entrepreneurship often receives less attention by policy makers than traditional industrial recruitment efforts as regional growth engines. The effects of entrepreneurship may be more subtle than the latter approaches, but business creation can hav...
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This study analyzes pre-Katrina variation in aggregate student performance and children's blood lead (BPb) in 117 elementary school districts in metropolitan New Orleans. Fourth grade student achievement on Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) tests were analyzed as a function of BPb for children 1-6 years old within school districts, co...
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We analyze household flood insurance purchases in Florida from 1999 to 2005, and the extent to which household insurance purchases correspond with flood mitigation activities by local governments involved in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS). Regression results indicate that household flood insurance pur...
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In the past decade, the maquiladora export industry surpassed both tourism and petroleum products to become the number one source of earned foreign exchange for Mexico. The continued growth of the maquila industry suggests that there may be significant production spillovers into the local environments. Dynamic modeling, using STELLA, provides a fra...
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The ghost towns of the American West are both intriguing historical artifacts and reflections of unique economic forces at work. In this study we develop linked labor and housing market models balancing the wages, rents, and local amenities of isolated boomtown sites to better understand the sources of such communities' dramatic cycles. High varian...
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This research identifies determinants of commuters’ transport mode decisions and the impact of hypothesized congestion taxes for the dense Central Business District of Jakarta, Indonesia. We first estimate commuters’ modal choices and time valuation through primary survey data then use these results to assess the efficiency and equity effects of co...
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We explore the variations in regional economic growth within 26 countries relative to the OECD norm between 1998 and 2003. This analysis sheds light on the role of regions in determining national growth patterns, while also providing a method similar to shift-share that can assess the relative importance of a range of demographic and economic facto...
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An introduction to the special issue on Rural and Regional Development.
Article
This article argues that using either the SIC or NAICS one-digit classifications as a method of aggregating two- and three-digit time series data can ignore important regional characteristics. We present a pairwise cointegration approach of aggregation where the aggregated sectors can vary widely across regions. By systematically constructing regio...
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The effects of travel distance on visitation and associated recreation benefits are tested for a large national park. Visitor responses to a survey depicting various natural resource scenarios at Rocky Mountain National Park were used to estimate the effects of distance traveled on nature-based tourism behavior and benefits. Distance was a signific...
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Private markets constantly assess project investment opportunities across a spectrum of such possibilities. The market's perspective on the boundary of viable projects, however, may be more limited than socially optimal due to informational constraints. In the case of economic development projects in particular, this boundary could be extended by p...
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This paper examines how amenities, asset indicators, and fiscal factors influence the growth in factors of production from 1972 to 1999 in the 466 non-metropolitan labor market areas in the continental United States. In developing our model of non-metropolitan factor markets, we combine the emphasis of Brown et al. (2003) on the affect of taxes and...
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Previous research indicates that local industry composition significantly influences unemployment in the American Rust Belt. This paper uses a dual market model to compare evolutions of structural joblessness in German regions with those of a Rust Belt area in the United States. Results indicate that German labor markets exhibit both intriguing sim...
Article
In spite of record economic growth in the 1990s, income inequality continued to escalate in the United States. One popular explanation is that the proportion of unskilled immigrant inflows has increased due to policy reforms over the last four decades. This study evaluates the impact of immigrant skills on inequality using a panel data set of state...
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Site designation conveys a unique set of signals to information-constrained potential visitors. Changes in designation thus offer natural experiments to evaluate the signaling importance of names. This paper estimates the visitation effect of the conversion of National Monuments to National Parks. Such conversions generate persistent significant im...
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Mushinski and Weiler (2002) updated a vein of rural economic geography literature by estimating empirically the importance for retail development of geographic interdependencies between places and their neighboring areas. This note extends interpretation of their empirical results by considering the influence of neighboring areas and establishments...
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Regions are facing rapidly evolving pressures from today’s global economy. The old rules of the game, where traditional assets such as cheap land and labor determined a region’s success or failure, no longer apply. Instead, new categories of assets are shaping economic prospects—assets like workforce skills, lifestyle amenities, access to capital a...
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Banks play a key role in helping rural regions transform their economies by funding new business ventures. In rural America, community bankers often have a unique perspective on their local economy and local business prospects, thanks to their heavy personal involvement and face-to-face contact with customers. But community banks must now face a ch...
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Jobs that require high-skill workers are becoming a crucial part of the rural economy—accounting for nearly 60% of today's rural jobs. Still, many outside firms and policymakers hold the outdated belief that rural America lacks the skills necessary to compete in the 21st century. At the heart of this myth is the reality that the traditional gauge o...
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The neglected advantages of “new markets” in marginalized rural and inner-city areas have been touted in the policy arena since the early 1990s. Althoughmuch of the motivation has been based on equity, there are potentially strong efficiency arguments for such renewed attention. This article proposes a unique combination of classic and more recent...
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This paper exploits the variation in union membership among states to analyze the impact of right-to-work (RTW) laws on union density. The study is unique in its use of controls for employer opposition to unions, political affiliation, and social capital. These variables capture different dimensions of attitudes toward unions which can underlie bot...
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Public land designations are often primarily political decisions that may also have substantial local economic impacts. This paper econometrically estimates the visitation effect of the conversion of National Monuments to National Parks through the eight designation changes that have occurred between 1979 and 2000. The study finds robust and signif...
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While previous research has generally found that immigration raises unemployment for natives, effects are often more muted than expected. Anticipated out-migration responses have been similarly difficult to discern. However, these findings may be byproducts of the long-run nature of most inquiries, which furthermore do not account for changes in na...
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Gl obalization is an economic reality in the new millennium , and every region on the planet now must adapt to an ever-changing global marketplace. Globalization presents especially difficult challenges for rural areas through fiercer competition in their traditional commodity markets. Yet at the same time, globalization brings these areas fresh op...
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Despi te the accelerating economic diversification of rural areas, many outside observers and policymakers still believe that rural America is synonymous with agriculture. While agriculture will always be a cornerstone of the rural economy, the prosperity of rural regions in the new century will depend crucially on their ability to produce more tha...
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New approaches to rural policy are badly needed, as past reliance on subsidies and policies focused on a single sector are yielding diminishing results. Fortunately, a new frontier of policy experiments is emerging, and this frontier holds great promise in helping rural regions seize new economic potential. ; This was the consensus of more than 120...
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A growing chorus of rural leaders agrees that new opportunities are on the horizon for rural America. Economic consolidation and outmigration need not be rural America’s future. The question most rural regions now face is this: How to claim the new opportunities? At root, this question is all about governance—how regions make economic decisions qui...
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The initial economic rationale for the border maquiladoras production sites appears to be waning. In particular, NAFTA and the rising cost of labor in the border area would seem to argue for such firms’ dispersion. However, the evolution of sectoral competitive advantages, which places a premium on proximity to both market and supply networks, in f...
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Urban sprawl has been criticized for its disproportionate impact on the environment. Yet urban areas are in fact less land-intensive than recent rural development patterns. Residential first-movers into such virgin areas may spark waves of ensuing development without incorporating the true social costs of their pioneering. This paper first explores...
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Inner city areas are often significantly “under-stored” (Loukaitou-Sideris 2000), with inadequate opportunities for residents to shop near their homes. More residents are transit dependent in inner cities than in the general metro area, making them even more constrained to local choices. But which types of establishments are needed in which locatio...
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Evaluating regional industrial structures remains an inexact process as traditional aggregation schemes often lump superficially similar but behaviorally distinct industries together. We use pairwise cointegration methods to apply econometric criteria to aggregate detailed industries into behaviorally similar sectors. Based on these aggregations, c...
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This paper analyzes the impact of immigration on low-skill native workers using pooled CPS data on cities in static and dynamic fixed effects models. Labor force participation is shown to be the dominant adjustment mechanism to immigrant inflows. Furthermore, native participation responses are stronger in immigrant-dense cities than in areas with s...
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Policy models such as Input-Output (10) or Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) are deterministic, with exogenous final demand shocks pro-ducing point estimates of local impacts. Confidence intervals around these point estimates, while desirable, are not readily available. Using the causal sta-tistical model to form confidence intervals around the...
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Central place theory describes an orderly hierarchy of places, with particular retail services developing for lower-ordered places as they reach a threshold. Yet it is likely that nearby areas could serve simultaneously as a source of demand and a source of competing supply for retail stores in a place. This paper contributes to the understanding o...
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Policy models such as Input-Output (IO) or Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) are deterministic, with exogenous final demand shocks producing point estimates of local impacts. Confidence intervals around these point estimates, while desirable, are not readily available. Using the causal statistical model to form confidence intervals around the in...
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The author uses a range of structural labor market models to understand differing regional jobless rates in a state affected by pockets of structural unemployment. Four theories of regional structural unemployment are presented, and their hypotheses are statistically evaluated using West Virginia county panel data. The author then presents case stu...
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Openings of women-owned businesses have radically accelerated recently. This paper explores the causes and results of this phenomenon. Noting the predictive weaknesses of the canonical neoclassical perspective, an extended institutional framework incorporating the impact of male-dominated networks seems to better explain women’s situations in both...
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The author uses a range of structural labor market models to understand differing regional jobless rates in a state affected by pockets of structural unemployment. Four theories of regional structural unemployment are presented, and their hypotheses are statistically evaluated using West Virginia county panel data. The author then presents case stu...
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Profitable private investments may be bypassed in struggling regions due precisely to such regions' isolation, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of marginalization. In many cases, development in such regions may be most effectively promoted by providing key information to the private and public sectors, thus addressing potentially significant mar...
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One of the crucial assumptions regarding the efficiency of the private market is that all involved actors have full information about market opportunities, costs, and benefits. However, this assumption is likely to be only partially fulfilled in many local economic development efforts. In fact, those who stand to benefit most from such efforts may...
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Even during periods of moderated national joblessness, certain regions face stubbornly high unemployment. “Rust Belt” areas are often particularly affected and raise the question of whether such labor markets may not clear even in equilibrium. This article examines evidence from a panel data set of West Virginia counties, along with case-study surv...
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Older industrial districts, often rich with history and architecture, are paradoxically central yet decaying features of the modern US urban landscape. However, several such areas are experiencing major renaissances through individual sparks of private business investment. Lower Downtown (LoDo) Denver is a well-known example of this phenomenon; les...
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Many influential members of the regional science community are concerned with the status of the discipline as it approaches its 40th birthday. While the held's research and teaching record as an ''interdiscipline'' is remarkable, its core methods and analyses are becoming dated. Gaps between the theory and practice of regional research are emerging...