ABSTRACT. Within this broader conversation, this contribution focuses on the relationship between prosperity and community resilience to natural hazards—a relationship that will only become more central as climate risks intensify. This paper examines three widely used measures from different literatures: • Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) – University of South Carolina A composite index spanning social, economic, community capital, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental dimensions. Used as an initial baseline for monitoring existing attributes of resilience to natural hazards, BRIC compares places to one another, to determine the specific drivers of resilience for counties, and to monitor improvements in resilience over time. • CDC Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) A 16-variable measure capturing how social and economic conditions shape a community’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from hazards. • Prosperity Index (Schmidt, Conroy, and Deller) A development-focused index measuring economic and social prosperity. All three share common building blocks—education, housing stability and quality, poverty, and unemployment—yet they emerge from different policy and research traditions. Initial results show: • Prosperity and resilience (BRIC) are positively related, but only modestly (correlation ≈ 0.3). • Social vulnerability and prosperity are more strongly and negatively related (≈ –0.47). These findings raise critical questions: • Can communities be resilient but not prosperous—or prosperous but not resilient? • What do places that score highly on both have in common? Or Low? • Are there policy tradeoffs between resilience-building and traditional development goals? • How can prosperity and resilience metrics be considered in tandem? This talk will address these questions through regional and spatial analyses and targeted case studies. The key discussion points are intended to focus on the idea that: As climate change intensifies floods, fires, heat, and storms, resilience must become a core part of the economic development conversation—not a separate or secondary agenda. How we measure success will shape what we invest in, who benefits, and which communities are seen as prosperous. This session is designed not as a finished answer, but as a serious, collaborative inquiry.

ABSTRACT. Health resilience refers to a community’s capacity to prevent, absorb, adapt to, and recover from health-related shocks while sustaining long-run population health and healthcare system performance. In the United States, healthcare accounts for nearly one-fifth of GDP, yet health outcomes remain deeply unequal across space, particularly in rural areas facing hospital closures, healthcare workforce shortages, financial strain, and limited access to care. Most existing health indices provide static, cross-sectional snapshots, ranking counties at a single point in time. While informative, these measures obscure the dynamic processes through which health systems evolve, masking persistence, path dependence, and adaptation. Communities accumulate advantages and disadvantages gradually through long-term investments, institutional capacity, workforce development, financing structures, and policy environments. As a result, counties may arrive at similar health outcomes through very different historical paths, and similarly situated counties today may be moving along fundamentally different future trajectories. A dynamic, trajectory-based perspective is therefore essential for understanding not only where communities stand, but how they arrived there, why disparities persist, and when policy interventions are most likely to alter long-run outcomes. Building on the prosperity pathways framework developed by Schmidt, D., Conroy, T., & Deller, S. (2025) which uses dynamic trajectories of poverty, unemployment, housing burden, and educational attainment to classify counties into distinct quality-of-life pathways. We conceptualize health resilience across four core domains: social and physical access, governance and prevention, financial access, and healthcare workforce capacity. Using longitudinal county-level data, we construct a dynamic health resilience index and apply sequence analysis and clustering methods to identify county typologies based on long-run health resilience trajectories.

ABSTRACT. Regional food systems have gained attention for the past two decades, and been linked to community outcomes as far-reaching as improving food access, health, thriving downtowns and community connectedness. Yet, communities across the United States differ widely in how easy it is to start, operate, and sustain food-related businesses, including farms, processors, distributors, retailers, and food service firms. Some places offer strong infrastructure, clear regulatory systems, reliable labor, financing access, and market connections, while others face persistent barriers. These differences shape not only where food businesses locate and grow, but also how local food systems develop and how much economic value communities are able to retain. While there is a rich literature on general business climate and entrepreneurship indices—such as the World Bank’s business environment framework, the Kauffman Startup Index, and state-level business climate measures—there is no consistent, food-system-specific index that captures how local business conditions shape food-system development. This paper develops a Quality of Food System Business Environment (QFSBE) Index, constructed as a one-year cross-sectional measure, drawing conceptually from widely used business environment and entrepreneurship indices and adapting them to the specific regulatory, infrastructural, and institutional features of food systems. The index integrates dimensions such as production and processing capacity, aggregation and logistics infrastructure, regulatory and policy conditions, market access, workforce availability, and business support. The primary goal is to map how food system business environments vary across counties, identify systematic spatial patterns, and understand why communities differ in their ability to support food-related enterprises. Rather than assuming a single development model, this approach highlights how different local strengths and constraints shape distinct development possibilities. As a next step, we explore how variation in food system business environments relates to regional food dollar distribution across the supply chain and to broader prosperity pathways followed by communities. This allows us to examine whether more supportive business environments are associated with deeper local processing and distribution activity, greater local value retention, and different long-run development trajectories. More broadly, this work seeks to understand why communities follow different paths, how strengths in one area can offset weaknesses in others, and how place-based strategies can support more inclusive and sustainable economic outcomes.

ABSTRACT. The past decades have witnessed significant economic transitions that have disrupted traditional economic activities, hitting some occupations harder while creating opportunities for others. Occupational connectivity, which measures how easily workers can transition to other emerging occupations, could potentially affect local labor market resilience and development. In this study, we use O*NET occupation-related skills data from the U.S. Department of Labor to construct an occupation matching matrix which measures how well-connected occupations are within local labor markets. Results suggest that counties with higher levels of occupational connectivity are likely to have higher labor force participation rates and employment-to-population ratios. In addition, places with more connected occupation networks are associated with lower population outmigration and higher net migration. Overall, our findings provide insights that can help local stakeholders develop more effective investment strategies for regional economic development and workforce policy.

ABSTRACT. The Appalachian region faces economic challenges from coal industry decline yet possesses significant natural gas reserves to support hydrogen production through the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH₂). This study quantifies the economic impacts of hydrogen investments across West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania using IMPLAN input-output modeling with three price scenarios: $7/kg (baseline), $16/kg (moderate), and $32/kg (high). For West Virginia alone, a 20-truck hydrogen fleet operating 100,000 miles annually generates total economic output ranging from $2.15 million (baseline) to $9.81 million (high scenario), supporting 14 to 63 jobs. Labor income spans $614,318 to $2.81 million, while tax revenues range from $394,814 to $1.80 million across all government levels. Scaling to the three-state region reveals dramatically larger impacts. At $7/kg, regional hydrogen production of 391.5 million kg annually generates $5.29 billion in output, 10,751 jobs, and $462 million in tax revenues. At $32/kg, impacts produced $24.19 billion in output, 49,146 jobs, and $2.11 billion in total tax revenues. Industrial gas manufacturing accounts for over 50% of direct output impacts across scenarios.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the impact of resource booms on export value, concentration, composition, and sophistication in resource-rich developing economies. Using a shift-share instrument that leverages heterogeneous exposure to Chinese demand after China’s 2001 WTO accession and the ex-ante composition of export baskets, I examine the causal effects on export baskets and sectoral employment of Brazilian local economies. The findings reveal increased export values and concentration in more exposed regions, with a shift from resource-based manufactures to primary products and declining export sophistication. Despite wage growth in primary and service sectors, primary employment remained stable while manufacturing jobs contracted, resembling a Dutch disease pattern. These results underscore the trade-offs of resource booms, where short-term gains in export value and sectoral wages may be offset by long-term development challenges. Given Brazil's similarities to other commodity exporters, these findings may indicate similar trends emerging across developing economies.

ABSTRACT. Sports games attract large numbers of spectators, generating substantial traffic around stadiums and raising concerns about mobility and safety. This paper investigates whether hosting major league sporting events generates localized effects on traffic safety, measured by the number of motor vehicle collisions and related injuries and fatalities. I leverage hourly, geo-located traffic collision data for New York City and exploit baseball games hosted at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field between 2012 and 2019. The empirical strategy applies an augmented regression discontinuity design using game start times as the cutoff and taking advantage of the exogenous scheduling structure of Major League Baseball. The results indicate a moderate positive effect of game days on the number of collisions and injuries, suggesting that traffic conditions deteriorate, and risks increase around the time games begin. Additional heterogeneous effects reveal that games overlapping with evening peak hours experience more pronounced impacts, as do games hosted at different stadium locations. These patterns suggest that stadium location, game-day traffic management practices, and the availability of public transportation infrastructure all play an important role in shaping traffic safety during game days.

ABSTRACT. Particulate matter is known to affect behavior, often rendering people less productive and/or more aggressive. Using micro-level data on the outcomes of traffic stops in Virginia and an instrumental variables model, I show that exposure to higher levels of particulate matter causes an increase in the probability that a driver or their vehicle is searched by 0.4 percentage points. Beyond this, I find no change in the probability that the driver is arrested, but the conditional probability of being arrested conditioned on being searched decreases by 7.1 percentage points on high particulate matter days. This equates to more than 1,000 additional unwarranted searches during traffic stops each year in Virginia. Additional analyses show that exposure to higher levels of particulate matter does not appear to cause an increase in accidents or an increase in traffic stops, suggesting that the increase in searches and the decrease in the conditional probability of being arrested if searched can be attributed to a change solely in the behavior of police officers and not drivers. In sum, exposure to high levels of particulate matter causes police officers to act more aggressively and, given the decreased conditional probability of being arrested if searched, less astutely.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how individuals adapt safety behavior when moving between risk environments that differ in frequency and severity of potential harm. Using a controlled laboratory experiment framed in a forestry management context, participants chose to invest in safety equipment across different risk environments over multiple periods. We find that individuals’ behavior is not solely shaped by the objective risk at hand, but by the sequence in which risks are encountered. Participants who experienced a high number of injuries during the early periods formed persistent internal benchmarks that continued to guide choices even after transitioning into a different environment. However, they remained open to information based descriptive priming and safety messages that summarized current risk. In contrast, participants who experienced few injuries in the early periods were more responsive to their latest experiences, adapting behavior based on experiential learning rather than descriptive primes. These patterns reveal a key distinction in learning pathways: some individuals respond primarily to targeted informational cues and safety communication, while others rely on direct experience to recalibrate risk preferences. These findings have important implications for workplace safety design, suggesting that the sequencing of risk exposure and the design of safety communication should be tailored to workers’ injury histories and to the way they process risk.

ABSTRACT. Understanding intranational trade flows is essential for analyzing regional interconnectedness, evaluating place-based and trade-related policies, and supporting the construction of subnational supply-use and input–output systems. Unlike in the case of international trade, however, interstate trade flows are not observed as a by-product of customs enforcement, since shipments across internal jurisdictional boundaries are not subject to duties or tariffs. As a result, information on subnational trade must be inferred from surveys collected for other purposes—most notably infrastructure and freight planning—which are not designed to measure production-to-consumption trade flows and embed substantial pass-through activity from wholesaling and warehousing. In this project, we develop a framework for estimating interstate trade in goods by re-purposing infrastructure-oriented shipment data. We factor observed flows into production-related shipments and pass-through activity arising from distribution, storage, and wholesale intermediation, allowing for cross-hauling between regions. Using a set of transparent assumptions and a large-scale numerical solver, we reconcile these components into a single matrix of production-origin to final-destination trade flows that is internally consistent. We assess the resulting estimates by cross-validating implied production patterns against independent Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics. The framework provides a policy-relevant representation of interstate goods trade that can be used as an input into broader systems of regional economic analysis.

ABSTRACT. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 marked a decisive rupture in EU–Russia trade relations. This rupture coincided with the unprecedented imposition of trade sanctions on Russia by the European Union, the United States and aligned countries, but also amid voluntary withdrawals of foreign companies from Russia, financial sanctions and related cross-country payments restrictions, and heightened political risk (Simola, 2022). While the literature is rich in ex-ante estimations of the economic effects of trade disruptions, ex-post assessments remain scarce. This paper seeks to address this gap by evaluating the income impact of the 2022 Russia trade decoupling with sanctioning countries and examine the extent to which trade reorientation towards alternative partners has mitigated these effects. The study introduces a novel Input–Output Structural Decomposition Analysis framework to trace value-added trade-shift effects across regional blocs. This approach refines Oosterhaven’s (1998) and Nagengast et al (2016) by addressing interdependencies among explanatory variables (Dietzenbacher and Los, 2000).

ABSTRACT. Previous studies have shown that trade shocks associated with Chinese imports profoundly impact local economies. These local impacts include job losses, population outmigration and rising poverty rates, and counties with more industries exposed to import competition from China in the past also experienced more impacts. New tariffs imposed by the current Trump administration are intended to counteract these effects by “bringing back manufacturing”. Here we analyze the short-term and long-term impacts of trade-induced employment and income shocks on 3,100 US counties from 2002 to 2025. We construct Bartik-type instruments to represent trade shocks on local economies, by applying a Chinese import shock to the share of employment at the county-level three-digit NAICS code. This gives trade shocks on manufacturing sectors since Chinese imports are mainly on manufacturing sectors. Noting that manufacturing employment, in particular, has not shown any recovery during 2025 nationally (the first year of tariffs), we describe and seek to explain county-level differences in potential employment rebounds resulting from such tariffs.

ABSTRACT. Gaps between rural and nonrural America are widening because place-based public investments that build long-term opportunity are unevenly distributed across geographies. While people-based spending—such as Social Security and Medicare—plays a vital role in stabilizing rural households, these programs do not rebuild the local infrastructure, workforce systems, or civic capacity needed for sustained economic growth. Analyzing U.S. Census of Governments data from 1977 to 2022, we find that per-capita local public spending is systematically lower in rural counties, with the widest disparity occurring at the municipal level where discretionary, place-based decisions matter most. Crucially, while nonrural governments often see higher spending in distressed areas, persistent poverty in rural America is associated with lower per capita local spending, further compounding geographic disadvantage. We also discover significant disparities in housing and community development, where nonrural areas invest two to three times more per capita. This gap is critical because quality-of-life amenities—including recreation, arts, and schools—emerge as vital drivers for workforce retention and attraction and retention in a modern, remote-work economy. These disparities stem from structural limits on rural fiscal agency—the tax base, discretion, and administrative capacity to plan and sustain long-term investment. Current federal and state funding systems often reinforce these constraints by favoring high-capacity regions and matching funds, and unintentionally excluding rural communities from discretionary resources. Using case studies from Portsmouth (OH), Selma (AL), and Taos (NM), we illustrate how strategic place-based economic development investments in broadband, utilities, and workforce development can restore local capacity and begin to reverse economic decline. Ultimately, closing the rural-urban divide requires a policy shift away from merely managing rural distress and toward rebuilding the fiscal and institutional agency of rural places to shape their own economic futures.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the economic impact of cancer in West Virginia

ABSTRACT. Closing the Digital Divide: New Insights on U.S. Broadband Availability

ABSTRACT. Lee County, Florida was devastated by Hurricane Ian on September 28, 2022, totaling an estimated \$3.22 billion in property damage. Using Local Area Unemployment Statistics, county-level controls, and a synthetic Lee County counterfactual, this paper found a 1.7 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate a month after impact, and the unemployment rate remained elevated until September 2023. These results contribute evidence of the short-term impacts of hurricanes on local labor markets, contributing to both the labor economics literature and the natural disaster literature.

ABSTRACT. We examine how the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a major liquidity support during COVID-19, affected business payment behavior. Linking establishment data from the National Establishment Time Series to PPP loan records, we find that PPP loans increased payment timeliness by about 1 day, primarily for businesses that received loans in 2020. The effect was stronger in industries that depend on trade credit and on face-to-face consumer service. Although designed to support payroll, PPP also eased short-term payment difficulties during liquidity shortages.

ABSTRACT. Why do some regions, after an initial spark such as R&D, innovation, or even serendipity, develop vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems while others do not? This paper introduces the Agglomeration-Clustering-Knowledge Spillovers (ACKS) model, which formalizes how localized anchors ignite reciprocating triangular forces that generate first- and second-generation knowledge spillovers. We conceptualize spillovers by their strength, length, and completeness, and represent them as conical volumes whose base area and height, respectively, capture geographic reach and local intensity of knowledge-spillover entrepreneurship. The paper pursues four objectives: (i) theorizing second-generation knowledge spillovers as the missing mechanism linking agglomeration to sustained regional development; (ii) specifying a triangularity index and distance-decay functions governing the radius of influence of knowledge spillovers; (iii) translating knowledge spillover “shapes” into testable predictions for new firm development, growth of skilled employment, wage premiums, and saturation; and (iv) examining intra- versus inter-industry dynamics and institutional or absorptive-capacity barriers. The model’s originality lies in geometrically characterizing knowledge spillovers and operationalizing them with parsimonious structural equations and measurable parameters, integrating fragmented literatures on clusters, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Its value is both theoretical and practical: the framework predicts when benefits concentrate or diffuse, offering diagnostic guidance for balancing reach (base) and intensity (height) across phases knowledge spillover lifecycle stages of spark, expansion, and decline.

ABSTRACT. After a period of stability, the United States has seen a resurgence in Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) infections, primarily driven by the opioid epidemic and associated injection drug use (IDU), particularly among young adults. States with higher opioid and other drug use have consistently reported higher rates of HCV infections, and Ohio is one example. This research utilizes the 2013-2023 Ohio Department of Health’s HCV county-level incidence. Using a panel dataset compiled from the Ohio Department of Health, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other publicly available data sources, this research examines whether the rural/urban and Appalachian versus non-Appalachian distinctions are associated with HCV incidence.

ABSTRACT. This paper estimates the impact of Social Security Administration (SSA) field office closures on participation in federal disability benefit programs. I exploit the uniform, nationwide closure of over 1,200 SSA field offices during the COVID-19 lockdown period as a natural experiment. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I compare changes in the number of newly enrolled disabled beneficiaries across ZIP codes with and without a local SSA office. The results show that, on average, closures reduced the number of disability beneficiaries by 2.3%. The effects are significantly larger in non-metropolitan areas (-9.4%) and in communities with low internet access (-6.65%), suggesting that limited digital infrastructure exacerbated the barriers imposed by the loss of in-person services. These findings provide evidence that in-person administrative access plays a vital role in facilitating disability program enrollment, particularly for vulnerable and digitally underserved populations. The results highlight the risks associated with digital-only service delivery models and emphasize the importance of maintaining physical access points in the design of equitable public service systems.

ABSTRACT. Healthcare spending in the United States is high relative to other sectors and continues to account for a substantial share of economic activity. The healthcare sector is also highly labor intensive, with clinical labor representing a significant component of total spending. In this environment, changes in who delivers care may play an important role in shaping healthcare expenditures.

The rapid expansion of nurse practitioner and physician assistants represents a major shift in the organization of healthcare delivery. Compared to physicians, midlevel providers are reimbursed at lower rates for comparable services, and their scope of practice varies across states. This paper examines how state-level institutional differences influence the composition of the clinical workforce and Medicare spending.

I exploit variation in nurse practitioner scope-of-practice laws, which determine the degree of clinical autonomy NPs have in evaluating, diagnosing, and prescribing. Using the staggered adoption of full practice authority across states, the analysis studies how changes in practice environments affect provider supply, the distribution of services across provider types, and Medicare payments. The study draws on publicly available Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data from 2013–2022, merged with the Area Health Resources Files, to construct state-year panels. The empirical strategy employs difference-in-differences methods designed for staggered policy adoption and treatment effect heterogeneity, focusing on how workforce organization shapes the allocation of clinical labor and Medicare spending.

ABSTRACT. Prior research highlights the importance of infrastructure for local economic activity. However, the local U.S. governments of areas that lost population in the past fifty years report struggling to support an infrastructure that exceeds the demands of the current residents. We introduce a novel measure of local infrastructure based on land coverage impervious to water. Using detailed local datasets on specific types of infrastructure and capital spending, we demonstrate that impervious land is a valid proxy local infrastructure that is broadly and consistently measured over an extended time period. We then test how municipalities with extensive infrastructure respond differently to trade shocks. We hypothesize that high infrastructure per capita creates a financial constraint for local governments, resulting in lower operating expenditures and a reduction in critical public services, which may exacerbate the shock. However, the economic losses in the presence of a shock may be softened and the recovery may be quicker in the long-run when infrastructure per capita is higher.

ABSTRACT. Regional economic development strategies are commonly evaluated using aggregate indicators such as job creation, output, or average household income. While these measures capture aspects of economic activity, they provide limited insight into whether regions are becoming economically sustainable for the residents who live and work there. In particular, they do not directly assess whether local wage structures are sufficient to sustain population retention, purchasing power, and long-run workforce competitiveness. This paper identifies a diagnostic gap in U.S. regional development practice and introduces the Regional Sustainability Gap Index (RSGI) as a complementary measure designed to address it. Drawing on a review of recent Comprehensive Economic Development Strategies (CEDS), we show that, despite wage growth being a stated strategic objective, median wages and purchasing power are rarely explicitly measured. RSGI integrates two components: a relative wage position measure and a wage-trajectory measure, capturing both a region’s current standing and its trajectory over time. Using county-level examples, we demonstrate how regions can appear economically successful under conventional metrics while experiencing widening gaps between wages and affordability that predict workforce erosion. The paper argues that wage-based sustainability metrics are necessary to align regional strategy with the economic conditions experienced by local workers and households and offers implications for regional planning and policy evaluation.

ABSTRACT. Peer analysis for regional strategic planning is a common and integral component of building a regional economic development plan. Which regions to select as the benchmark set is critical for comparing likes with likes—population size, economic scale and structure, geographic proximity and physical amenities. Regional constituencies and leadership aspire to improve economic outcomes and, therefore, look to thriving regions to emulate or borrow best practices for strategy and tactics. Imitate success. This paper raises warning flags for analysts, consultants, research practitioners, and especially for stakeholders. Standard criteria for selecting peers, and building strategy, may play to the familiar consultant playbook and recommendations. Adaptability, learning and even changing course mid-analysis may serve all stakeholders best. Reconsidering the geographic units of analysis within a region can prove to be beneficial. We expose the folly of using the combined statistical area of Raleigh–Durham (mostly composed of the Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill MSAs) to compare with four other MSAs with similar population size of the CSA. Raleigh–Durham shares the Research Triangle. There are considerable contrasts in industry structure and population characteristics however. The presence of several geographic and economic subregions, each with different economic structures, demographic profiles, resources and history speaks to the need for building multiple, geotargeted, tactical plans that are coordinated within the larger vision of a region’s strategic plan. The second big idea is pointing to data sources and metrics—for example, patents, foreign direct investment, and business births and deaths—that can be decomposed into finer geographic units to provide insights for targeted economic development strategies.

ABSTRACT. Residents in frontier areas face unique challenges accessing essential resources and basic healthcare services due to their low population densities and extensive travel times to urban areas. We present a novel geographic coding scheme that overcomes limitations of traditional urban-rural classifications, which fail to distinguish populations in highly remote and sparsely populated frontier areas of the United States. This coding scheme, the Integrated Metropolitan-to-Frontier Area Codes (IMFAC), combines the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service’s Frontier and Remote Area codes with conventional metropolitan and micropolitan area delineation standards at the census tract (tIMFAC) and county (cIMFAC) levels. We use descriptive techniques to explore the distribution of population, land area, and health care resources across IMFAC categories. Our results indicate that frontier locations had a relatively small population share, a relatively large land share, and are generally grouped with micropolitan or rural areas when remoteness is not considered. We also find that healthcare facilities varied within frontier categories, with frontier-small town/rural areas generally facing longer distances compared to frontier-micropolitan areas. This innovative coding scheme provides a methodological and policy-relevant tool for better understanding and addressing the unique health challenges of frontier populations, as well as an alternative approach to traditional urban-rural classifications when researching health differences across the metropolitan-to-frontier continuum.

ABSTRACT. We provide a game-theoretic analysis of competition between a private firm started by a creative class member and a public firm owned by a regional government. The private firm maximizes profit whereas the public firm maximizes a weighted sum of social welfare and profit. In this setting, we first compute the best response functions of the two firms. Second, we compute the equilibrium levels of output and the total market output. Third, we determine the socially optimal output level and compare this level with the previous equilibrium outcome. Fourth, we show that when the weight on social welfare rises, total output rises, the equilibrium price falls, and social welfare in our regional economy rises. Finally, assuming that the weight on social welfare is less than unity, we compute the optimal quantity subsidy that ensures optimal production by the two firms and then we note that this subsidy is the same for both the firms under study.

ABSTRACT. Pollution in the Ganges river in India is particularly serious in a few locations such as Kanpur, because of the activities of tanneries, and in Varanasi, because of religious tourism. On the assumption that cleaning decisions are decentralized, we analyze the implications of two kinds of taxation and majority voting for pollution cleanup. First, we examine how a poll tax on citizens of the locality under study and majority voting together affect total pollution cleanup. Second, we study how a proportional tax on the citizens of the relevant locality and majority voting together impact aggregate pollution cleanup. Finally, for alternate income distributions, we discuss which of the two preceding cleanup amounts is closer to the efficient amount of cleanup.

ABSTRACT. Safe and reliable drinking water is a fundamental public health good, yet many public water systems (PWSs) in the United States regularly fail to meet regulatory standards. A large literature documents the diffuse and persistent harms of nonpoint-source pollution, particularly from agriculture, which remains the largest unregulated contributor to nutrient runoff despite decades of mitigation efforts. At the same time, violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) are widespread and unevenly distributed across systems and regions. This paper examines how upstream agricultural pressure shapes downstream drinking water compliance behavior under the SDWA. Compliance distinguishes between health-based violations, such as maximum contaminant level (MCL) and treatment technique (TT) violations, and monitoring and reporting (MR) violations, which differ sharply in compliance costs and enforcement consequences. We exploit a regulatory reform in 2009–2010, when the Environmental Protection Agency introduced a point-based Enforcement Targeting Tool (ETT) that weighted violations by severity and prioritized enforcement against systems exceeding a threshold. Because health-based violations receive substantially higher penalty weights than MR violations, the reform altered compliance incentives. When upstream agricultural activity increases treatment pressure, systems may reallocate compliance effort across regulatory margins, prioritizing the avoidance of higher-penalty violations. Using spatially explicit measures of nutrient-intensive crop production combined with directional hydrological linkages and a triple-difference design, our preliminary results suggest a statistically significant increase in MR violations among systems facing both higher upstream agricultural pressure and stronger enforcement incentives after the reform. The results are consistent with regulatory substitution driven by enforcement design rather than abrupt changes in underlying water quality, with important implications for drinking water regulation and enforcement.

ABSTRACT. Homeownership has long been considered a major component of the American Dream and a desirable policy goal. While a substantial literature examines the benefits of homeownership and the factors underlying homeownership gaps, far less is known about whether economic shocks—particularly positive shocks such as economic booms—generate spillover effects on individuals’ housing tenure decisions. We address this gap by examining how the economic shock induced by the fracking boom affected local homeownership rates. To mitigate concerns about endogeneity, we employ an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Our preliminary results reveal a statistically significant and positive relationship between oil and gas employment and homeownership, indicating that the fracking boom increased the likelihood of homeownership. Further analysis shows that this effect persists beyond the boom period, suggesting that the homeownership effect from the boom is not temporary. We also conduct subsample analyses to explore heterogeneity in homeownership responses across demographic groups. Given the substantial economic gains associated with the fracking boom and the potential benefits of homeownership, our findings highlight the important role of positive economic shocks in shaping housing tenure decisions and carry broader implications for housing and regional development policy.

ABSTRACT. Sundown towns — communities that excluded Black residents through formal and informal means between 1890 and 1968 — shaped the spatial distribution of population and economic activity across the United States. Prior work suggests that exclusionary legacies constrain contemporary economic development (Crowe, 2012; Crowe & Ceresola, 2014) and perpetuate racial inequality (O'Connell, 2019), while recent work has documented the national scope of sundown town formation (Bazzi et al., 2022; Rigby et al., 2025). Yet large-scale quantitative evidence on the long-run economic consequences remains limited. This paper provides the first nationally representative analysis of the persistent effects of sundown towns on economic development trajectories, drawing on theories of institutional persistence and path dependence (North, 1990; Pierson, 2000; Boettke et al., 2008) to explain why exclusionary institutions may outlast the formal policies that created them. Linking a national database of confirmed sundown communities (Rigby et al., 2025) to decennial census data from IPUMS (1880–2020), I construct a panel of sundown and non-sundown places spanning more than a century and all major U.S. regions. Building on prior work distinguishing between violent expulsion of existing Black residents and anticipatory prevention of Black settlement through restrictive institutional design (Gonzalez, 2025; Gonzalez, forthcoming), I test whether different exclusionary pathways produced systematically different long-run trajectories in income, economic structure, and demographic patterns. The empirical strategy employs propensity score matching on pre-treatment community characteristics. For economic structure variables available across the full panel, I additionally conduct exploratory event-study-style analysis tracing trajectories before, during, and after the sundown era (1890–1968) to assess pre-trend validity and document when divergence emerged. The national sample substantially increases statistical power relative to prior state-level analysis — particularly for communities that used violent expulsion, where earlier estimates were constrained by small samples. Prior evidence from Illinois found that exclusion through restrictive institutional design was associated with higher observed incomes among remaining residents — likely reflecting compositional effects of selective sorting — though these differences declined over time, while demographic exclusion persisted. This paper tests the generalizability of these patterns nationally and examines regional heterogeneity in how different forms of historical exclusion shaped long-run development trajectories.

ABSTRACT. Using event study and DiD estimators, this paper evaluates the effect of KKK participation on population growth and composition in Indiana, using the 1920 Klan enrollment and participation data. This study reports a significant, 3-4 decade shock to population growth, and composition. This work is consistent with much of the Sociological literature on community effects, but contradicts earlier economic work suggesting muted local effects (Fryer and Levitt, 2012).

ABSTRACT. Anti-labor and anti-unionization legislation—commonly referred to as “Right to Work” policies—have received considerable attention from scholarship within the fields of econometrics and political science. Recently, these policies have begun to pepper empirical sociological work, where the majority of discussion has been aimed toward their influence on the distribution of economic resources, inequality, and bargaining power among employees through the perspective of power resources theory. However, little sociological research has examined the theoretical and causal mechanisms that drive the passage of right to work policies. Using historical data from the United States Census Bureau, the present study examines whether a key theoretical indicator of Blalock’s (1967) minority threat theory operates as a conditional risk factor toward the passage of right to work legislation. Event history analyses demonstrate that the percent of the Black population within a state significantly impacts risk of right to work passage, suggesting that, beyond the scope of power resources, an interest for Whites to maintain their group position may explain the passage of right to work policies.

ABSTRACT. Electricity access remains a central development challenge, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, where structural constraints and institutional weaknesses continue to hinder progress. While income, human development, and demographic factors are known to influence electrification outcomes, the role of fiscal capacity and governance remains less well understood. Using a balanced panel of 43 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2002 to 2023, this study examines the determinants of electricity access with a particular focus on the interaction between public debt and governance quality. Two fixed-effects models are estimated, one with and one without an interaction term between gross government debt and governance. The results show that the interaction term is positive and highly significant, indicating that the effectiveness of public borrowing depends critically on institutional strength. Countries with stronger governance are better able to translate debt into productive infrastructure investments, while those with weaker institutions do not experience the same benefits. These findings highlight the importance of pairing fiscal strategies with institutional reforms to maximize the developmental impact of public borrowing.

ABSTRACT. We exploit quasi-random variation around multi-threshold criteria utilized for classifying Census Towns (CTs) and focus on settlements near the thresholds that are likely to obtain statutory recognition. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we instrument for urban local governance to identify the effect on local public goods provision. We document a first stage relationship between meeting CT thresholds and statutory recognition. Our results show that obtaining an Urban Local Body (ULB) increases local public good provision: government schools increase by 14 (primary), 8 (middle), and 5 (secondary) units, healthcare infrastructure expands by 2 hospitals and 3 family welfare centers, and financial access deepens with 2 cooperative banks and 2 agricultural credit societies. Community amenities improve modestly with an additional public library, reading room, and cinema hall. Sports infrastructure declines by 5 facilities, consistent with our understanding of reallocation of urban space and investments. Our findings suggest that timely municipalization of emerging urban areas can expand public goods provision.

ABSTRACT. The literature contains little work that helps explain cross-country differences in women’s rights. This paper explains gender-based inequalities in contemporary female economic, political, labor market, and body rights by the effect of ancient irrigation agriculture on cultural norms. We provide empirical evidence using recent causal machine learning methods, an exogenous measure of irrigation, cross-country data from the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law database, as well as individual level regional data from the Afrobarometer and the World Values Survey. The suggested mechanism stems from local irrigation agriculture in pre-industrialized societies leading to women working close to home, reducing the access to labor markets and political discourse. Due to intergenerational cultural transmission this diminished women’s influence throughout history, resulting in more unequal contemporary laws governing women’s rights in regions with a legacy of irrigation agriculture.

ABSTRACT. An adequate supply of affordable and habitable housing is often a policy priority for federal, state, and local governments in the United States. Many of these entities enact programs designed to make housing more affordable for residents within their jurisdictions, especially those with low incomes. However, information asymmetries across programs funded by federal departments (such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and The Department of Agriculture (USDA)), as well as across programs at different tiers of the federalist system, might encourage actions that exacerbate spatial inequalities. In this study, we utilize data from USDA and HUD to consider the interplay between federal programs to determine if these programs appear to be complements or substitutes, particularly for suburban and rural localities. In addition, we use government budget data from the Census of Governments to analyze how state and local governments respond to federal programs and funding for public housing and community development initiatives to determine whether states and localities tend to increase or decrease their own investment in response to federal funding or if they appear to act independently. The results will inform discussions on optimal spatial housing policy.

ABSTRACT. Quality of life extends beyond just economic opportunity: high quality of life places provide access to resources, critical institutions, and desirable community features that enhance the lived experience of people in those places. Natural amenities play a central role in shaping quality of life. While often characterized as an amenity exclusive to rural places, rural communities can face uneven access to natural amenities. Especially among rural communities experiencing depopulation and disinvestment, a lack of local capacity to maintain and steward natural resources hinders their ability to leverage these amenities. Yet places, however remote, do not exist in isolation. Natural amenities are experienced and shared across geographic and administrative boundaries. In this study, we examine how the “borrowing” of natural amenities between counties affects quality of life across the rural-urban continuum. We then ask who is best positioned to borrow these amenities, and whether borrowability is mediated by income, geographic distance, or age composition. Findings from this study contribute to a broader understanding of the spatial dimensions of quality of life, particularly by assessing whether it can be borrowed through access to natural amenities, and if so, by whom.

ABSTRACT. A gap in age-adjusted mortality rates between rural and urban areas emerged in the 1990s as rural residents began dying at a higher rate than their urban counterparts. This mortality gap has been widening ever since. The growing mortality gap is pronounced among adults in their prime working years (ages 25–54), which has important implications for rural productivity and economic development. Despite the heightened mortality rates in rural areas, there is still a limited understanding of the health-related mechanisms fueling this worsening rural-urban mortality disparity in recent decades. Using nationally representative data from the 1999–2000 to 2017–March 2020 cycles of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), we combine individual-level data, including nurse-obtained biomarkers, and place-based (county-level) characteristics to create a comprehensive dataset spanning a 20-year period. We employ linear regression models to estimate the magnitude of rural-urban gaps for various health behaviors and outcomes—or mortality risk indicators. Decomposition analysis suggests that factors driving the gap are changing across the study period and that county-characteristics are responsible for more of the gap than metropolitan status codes. We find evidence of a suite of rural health disadvantages for both adult populations, which can help explain the growing rural longevity disadvantage in rural America and inform policies and programs aimed at improving rural health and economic outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Obesity, poor diet quality, and physical inactivity are common health issues in the United States. To remedy these issues among low-income households, the United States Department of Agriculture created the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education Program (SNAP-Ed), which promotes healthy eating and physically active lifestyles through nutrition education, social marketing, and other avenues. The social marketing approach of SNAP-Ed uses marketing strategies to relay information to the public in the form of research, advertising, and mass communication. In Kentucky, a statewide billboard campaign was launched in 2018 encouraging residents to focus on nutrition and physical activity. This study investigates the impact of that campaign on local health outcomes in communities throughout Kentucky. Using data from KYNEP on the location of billboard interventions in conjunction with county-to-county commuting flow data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we create a novel “shift-share” variable that captures county-level exposure to the campaign. Using a continuous treatment difference-in-differences framework, we then approximate the campaign’s effect on short- and long- run health outcomes using data from County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. Results from this study will help nutrition education administrators determine the efficacy of billboard campaigns and could potentially be used in determining social marketing methods for other programming areas. Results will also assist policymakers when making future decisions involving SNAP-Ed funding.