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The opioid crisis has impacted many regions of the United States, transcending socioeconomic, demographic, and political divides and leading to urgent calls for public health and law enforcement interventions. It has hit both micropolitan and rural smaller communities especially hard, with severe increases in prescription drug-induced fatalities over time. This paper explores socioeconomic determinants and spatial disparities of fatalities caused by drug and opioid overdose (both intentional and unintentional), focusing specifically on rural-urban differences and understanding the separate role of net farm income in the drug overdose crisis. Our panel data analysis of all US counties spanning the 1970-2016 period indicates that rurality, as measured by lower population density, is associated with higher deaths rates. Importantly, while our research suggests that the opioid crises went hand in hand with declining net farm income, the effect appears to be small. Specifically, we estimate that each $10,000 reduction in net income per farm is associated with a 0.04 increase in overdose age-adjusted deaths per 100,000 people. This effect is more prominent in counties with persistent poverty, which also is predominantly rural. Given the pronounced variability in farm financial indicators over time, the relative health of the farm sector in rural areas may warrant more attention if the pressing health crisis is to be addressed effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor mental health creates significant economic costs, in addition to human suffering, and is a growing world-wide concern, especially with an aging population. To estimate the cost of this disease in the U.S., we adopt a conventional economic growth model and include the number of poor mental health days (PMHD) as a right-hand side variable. Controlling for various county-level variables associated with income growth, our results suggest that one additional PMHD is associated with a 1.84 percentage point lower per capita real income growth rate, or $53 billion less total annual income, across the U.S. between 2008 and 2014. This effect is in addition to the income losses associated with the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A regional economy perturbed by a shock may move onto a new growth path by reestablishing economic linkages both internally and with other regions. This dynamic property of regions has recently been explained in terms of regional economic resilience. In this paper, we introduce a more refined measure of economic resilience and then apply it to monthly employment data for U.S. counties in the 2007-2009 downturn. We suggest that describing and analyzing the distinct response patterns during this downturn are important starting points for policy makers to understand the spatial resilience of the US economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the surging interest in entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy, studies of the independent relationship between proprietorship formations and job growth are virtually nonexistent. We find that self-employment or proprietorship rates are associated with faster job growth in the wage-and-salary sector, and the effect is statistically significant. The relative magnitude of this effect varies with the business cycle, being stronger during economic expansions and weaker during contractions. Further, the effect is stronger in metropolitan than in non-metropolitan counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the returns to human capital in rural areas with those in urban areas, and across the different regions of the US. A key finding is that these returns are considerably lower in rural than in urban areas. Furthermore, failure to correct for spatial dependence bias produces an overestimate of the returns to education at the county-level. We also examine various interactions among the regressors to identify the reasons why the returns to education vary between rural and urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the factors that account for differences in food stamp expenditure dynamics over space is important not only for potentially improving public policy but also for clarifying the relative roles of factors that are and are not under the control of welfare recipients in determining their ability to move off welfare rolls. This study contributes to the literature by including a better measure of employment opportunities for welfare recipients, allowing for potential endogeneity in the unemployment rate, and by correcting for spatial dependence bias that may result from the clustering of poverty in "pockets." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]