Improved land-use efficiency in agricultural production is crucial to meet increasing demand for agricultural commodities using the finite area of arable land worldwide. By applying a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier methodology to county-level data spanning from 1980 to 2011, we...

Firm location affects firm risk through local factor prices. We find more procyclical factor prices such as wages and real estate prices in areas with more cyclical economies, namely high “local beta” areas. While procyclical wages provide a natural hedge against aggregate shocks and reduce...

Economic statistics are frequently produced at an administrative level such as the sub-national division. However, these measures may not adequately capture the local variation in the economic activities that is useful for analyzing local economic development patterns and the exposure to natural...