Place-based or geographically-targeted policy has been promoted as a way to help poor regions and the poor people who live there. Yet, such policy has often been attacked by economists as slowing needed economic adjustments, redirecting resources to lower productivity regions, and supporting...

Two largely separate literatures exist on regional economic development and land use economics. In this chapter, we argue that a full understanding of each of the two areas requires greater knowledge of their interrelationship. We review key studies of the two literatures, particularly those...

Intellectual appeal and simplicity of use has led to the widespread application of the spatial hedonic model in assessing regional quality of life. Yet, the traditional spatial hedonic approach contains numerous assumptions, which typically are untested. Violation of the assumptions in practice...

The influence of the housing market bubble on U.S. business cycle dynamics during the previous decade has been well-documented. Yet, little if anything is known about how nonmetropolitan areas fared during the period. This study examines the association of regional housing market bubbles with...

Using a spatial hedonic growth model, this paper empirically examines the relative roles of natural amenities and urban agglomeration economies as determinants of U.S. regional growth patterns from 2000 to 2010. Natural amenities and urban agglomeration are measured using the USDA Economic...

The dramatic increase in oil and gas production from shale formations has led to intense interest in its impact on local area economies. Exploration, drilling and extraction are associated with direct increases in employment and income in the energy industry, but little is known about the...

Faced with declining economic bases, many nonmetropolitan areas increasingly have become concerned about their future economic viability. A crucial dimension of this concern is the balancing of the need to be cost-competitive in terms of lower taxes against the need for provision of valued...

This paper discusses various ways to add correlated stochastic recovery to the base correlation framework for pricing CDOs. Several recent models are extended to more general framework. The pros and cons of these models for calibration to single name CDS and index CDO tranches are discussed. It...

The way monoline insurers estimate the FAS 157 credit value adjustments (CVA) on their ABS CDO insurance portfolios vastly overstates the benefits. We propose a simple method that is more accurate, especially when the counterparty default risk is high. The counterparty default recovery rate is...

Heightened systematic risk in the credit crisis has created challenges to CDO pricing and risk management. One important focus has been on the modeling of stochastic recovery. Different approaches within the Gaussian Copula framework have been proposed, but a consistent model was lacking until...