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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-edq-10.1177_08912424231152873 for Banking Deserts and the Paycheck Protection Program by Kristopher Deming and Stephan Weiler in Economic Development Quarterly

Urban sprawl has been criticized for its disproportionate impact on the environment. Yet urban areas are in fact less land-intensive than recent rural development patterns. Residential first-movers into such virgin areas may spark waves of ensuing development without incorporating the true social costs of their pioneering. This paper first explores both benefit/cost and game-theoretic frameworks for understanding the private strategies and social implications of such pioneer developments. Evidence regarding regional land-use intensities, path-dependence of rural development, and accumulating social costs of rural sprawl are then presented to highlight the relevance of this paper's theoretical perspective in the Rocky Mountain West. The primary conclusion of the combined theoretical and empirical work is that pioneering development in innovative rural locations is likely relative to the social optimum, suggesting a rationale for public policy.

An introduction to the special issue on Rural and Regional Development.

The ghost towns of the American West are both intriguing historical artifacts and reflec-tions of unique economic forces at work. In this study we develop linked labor and housing market models balancing the wages, rents, and local amenities of isolated boomtown sites to better understand the sources of such communities’ dramatic cycles. High variance boom-towns provide a unique context for investment in housing and other foundational infrastruc-ture, leading directly to the unusually transient local development patterns seen in ghost town settings. We use Colorado-based case studies to illustrate the relevance of the model. Comparisons with more modern rural settings in Appalachia and the Midwest suggest that the model provides a framework to better understand the process of rural decline more generally.

The increasingly rapid changes in the world marketplace are having significant effects on all regional economies, creating both challenges and opportunities. The challenges for rural economies have been especially pronounced. Rural economies rely on low land and labor prices for their competitiveness, with commodity agriculture and manufacturing as their economic foundations. Globalization is introducing the possibility of much lower input costs for commodity production, leading to a steadily deteriorating competitive position for these traditional rural industries. Agriculture continues this transition after a particularly sharp series of contractions in the 1980’s; rural manufacturing plants are arguably going through their most difficult transition phase. Neither can be the easy, natural, longer-term economic foundation for the rural economy in the future.