Latest Research Featured in Economic Development Quarterly
November 2024; volume 38 issue 4 https://journals.sagepub.com/home/edq
The November issue of Economic Development Quarterly covers a wide range of economic development issues.
Zheng, Marantz, Kim, and Hipp, in their paper Dissolving Districts: Did Property Values Fall When California Terminated Its Redevelopment Agencies?, used a surprising 2012 court decision that dissolved the state’s tax increment financing (TIF) districts to estimate their effectiveness. The elimination of these districts was not associated with a decline in residential property values in the impacted area, suggesting that TIFs and their potential for financing public capital improvements were ineffective in enhancing residential development. The lack of evidence that TIFs improved property values suggests that they primarily simply captured and redirected revenue streams from their intended purpose.
The authors indicate that TIF may still serve as a useful tool in the redevelopment of commercial and industrial blighted areas; however, the former 30- to 40-year duration for the districts could be shortened. They caution that care should be taken not to grant TIFs in high growth areas as their impact may be limited to capturing and redirecting revenue streams.
Recent research by Chetty and his co-authors suggest that where you grow up has a significant influence on your future income.[i] Carlston and Wei, in their paper Urban Sprawl and Intergenerational Mobility: City- and Neighborhood-Level Effects of Sprawl, further redefine this finding by showing that sprawl could also negatively impact intergenerational economic mobility by lowering both social cohesion and job accessibility. Interestingly, these harmful impacts can statistically be associated with metro sprawl and neighborhood sprawl. However, this negative relationship is not seen for children living in high-income households.
It is not only the urban landscape that may impact economic well-being: climate may also play a role. Lee and Winters, in their paper Too Cold to Venture There? January Temperature and Immigrant Self-Employment Across the United States, found that an area’s January temperature had a negative effect on self-employment rates among foreign immigrants, especially those who entered the country as adults. This climate factor still holds when controlling for individual and local characteristics. The authors suggest that these findings indicate that entrepreneurial immigrants have skills and abilities that allow them to be selective when choosing their community.
In their paper, How does Innovation-Collaboration Network Structure Influence Regional Economic Resilience?, Wen and Fang explore the importance of networks and their impact on a region’s economic adaptation—the ability of a region to bounce back -- and adaptability—the ability to adjust to longer-term trends. Interestingly, they use co-patenting networks as proxies for innovation-collaboration networks. The authors find that there could be a tradeoff between the two. Tight networks enhance a region’s ability to adapt to economic shocks but could be a disadvantage in addressing harmful long-term trends. On the other hand, looser networks allow regions to adjust to long-term trends but are not very useful in counteracting economic shocks.
The field of economic development also includes measuring the impact of seemingly non-economic policies. Bauman et.al, in their paper Building Representative State Groupings in an Input-Output Model for the Development of an Economic Impact Calculator for Nutrition Incentive Programs, develop a model to measure the economic impact of people eating better. Eating your vegetables and fruit has been shown to improve your health, Bauman et.al offer an easy-to-use tool for practitioners to apply in measuring the economic impact of these food-based programs. While these impacts are clearly secondary to the health consequences of having a better diet, they can be important in obtaining necessary funding for these important programs.
In a more traditional economic impact study, Scavette measures the economic impact of the Boeing aircraft assemble plant in South Carolina in his paper, Aerospace Place-Based Policy: The Impact of Boeing on South Carolina's Aerospace Industry. Instead of using a standard input-output approach, Scavette incorporated a difference-in-differences and synthetic difference-in-differences estimators. Not surprising, the author finds that the Boeing plant has a substantial impact on the state’s economy
Finally, Jay D. Gatrell reviews Ryberg-Webster’s Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, which advocates that historic preservation can be used to energize inner-city communities and their struggling commercials districts.
[i] Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Kline, P., & Saez, E. (2014). Where is the Land of Opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 129(4): 1553–1623.