Multifunctionality of agriculture is being heralded as a way to achieve food and fiber production while simultaneously providing ecological services and promoting rural development through the establishment of new enterprises. However, in order for multifunctional agriculture to achieve these...

Attracting manufacturing investment is a frequently used rural development policy. Previous research in the location literature has informed policymakers which factors are most important for attracting new firm investment. Far less is known about the interaction of birth and death of...

Most U.S. farm households have either the operator or spouse working off-farm for wages and salaries or proprietorships. Additionally, off-farm income continues to grow as a share of total household income. Little is known about how changes in local industrial composition impact off-farm labor...

This paper addresses changes in capital formation by testing the importance of location factors with respect to the rate of establishment births and deaths in U.S. manufacturing, 2000–2004. A theoretical concept called “localized creative destruction” is tested as a mechanism to explain...

This study assesses the initial economic outcomes of the Delta Regional Authority (DRA), which began funding rural development projects in the Mississippi Delta region in 2002. The study focuses on non-metropolitan DRA counties and similar counties elsewhere in the Mississippi Delta region and...

In December 2007 the U.S. economy entered a depression and unemployment surged to highs not seen in 30 years. The first part of this paper uses the most recently available data from BLS to examine the geography of the recession. We focus on the similarities and differences in the recession’s...

This paper estimated the fiscal impact of a job creation tax credit, a proposed incentive for establishments participating in the Indiana enterprise zone program. State unemployment insurance files were utilized with GIS to obtain enterprise zone data. Labor demand and labor supply were...

Conventional measures of gross domestic product (GDP) fail to account for the effect of economic activity on the environment. Integrated environmental-economic (or 'green') GDP is calculated using a data-envelopment-analysis (DEA) framework. For this purpose a dynamic cross-country technology is...

This paper evaluates the impact of increasing concentration of the livestock sector on the economic welfare of rural Illinois. A pooled time-series, cross-sectional model is developed to study the dynamics of structural changes in hog production for the period 1981-1997. The model tests the...