HIGHWAY INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND COUNTY EMPLOYMENT GROWTH: A DYNAMIC PANEL REGRESSION ANALYSIS

This paper uses recent advances in dynamic panel econometrics to examine the impact of highway infrastructure on aggregate county-level employment using data for all 100 North Carolina counties from 1985 through 1997. Results are compared to models that do not take endogeneity of highway investment and dynamics of employment adjustment into account. Fully specified dynamic models are found to give insignificant results compared to these other models. Thus, when these issues are properly modeled, the results show that improvements in highways have no discernible impact on employment. Copyright (c) 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.