Economic development agencies seek industries to benefit their local economies. This article investigates how manufacturing composition affects a region’s income and educational attainment using data for individuals and Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1970 through 2009. The...

Rubin sounded an alarm indicating that economic development practitioners were less than strategic in their economic development incentive adoption when he declared that developers “shoot anything that flies, claim anything that falls.†This article builds on the work of those who have...

Scholars often explain the rise of tax increment financing (TIF) as a natural progression toward localized revenue sources born of devolution, increased interlocal competition for business investment, and fiscal constraint. Although such factors provide important context, our genealogy of TIF in...

Economic development practitioners and scholars recognize the link between universities and regional economic development. It is predicated on the spillover of knowledge from universities to commercialization. The literature has focused on the supply side, which involves university research and...

Using an aggregate production function, the impact of runways at commercial airports on several measures of metropolitan statistical areas’ economic welfare in combination with labor, private capital, and public-sector capital is estimated. By focusing on runways at commercial airports,...

The wage premium between skilled and unskilled workers in Mexican maquiladoras has increased, from nearly 2 times in 1981 to nearly 4 or 5 times in 2006, depending on the sector. This increase favoring skilled workers is examined against relative labor supplies within a class of models estimated...

In recent years, local officials throughout the United States have attempted to retool workforce development programs that have historically been tied to federal antipoverty efforts to address the needs of employers in industries considered important for local economic development. But are these...

We study the extent to which the characteristics of universities and technology transfer offices located within different regional contexts affect the transfer of scientific knowledge, both in the form of licensing and spin-off firm creation. By using data from Spain for the period 2005 to 2008,...

This article extends previous research by the authors on the spatial and temporal evolution of housing values across the United States to examine the impact of the 2007 financial crisis. The specific goals are to (a) document certain pre- and postcrisis trends in the nation’s economic...

We study collaborative and noncollaborative projects that are supported by government grants. First, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze optimal decisions in these projects. Second, we test our hypotheses with a unique data set containing academic publications and research funds for...