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The COVID-19 pandemic pressured local governments to employ creative and untested economic development strategies to stabilize private businesses. To explore how the uncertainty of the pandemic impacted the priorities and strategies of economic development officials, we surveyed officials about their initial economic development response to the pandemic coupled with subsequent in-depth interviews in the Cincinnati metropolitan region. Our analysis suggests that local officials did not drastically alter their use of supply-side tools during the pandemic. However, they did start coupling supply-side with demand-side policies in unique ways compared to past economic crises. This study also finds that the pandemic affected collaboration processes, leading officials to deepen and forge relationships with other local governments. We find that these shifts have proven durable over the past year as municipalities continue to grapple with changing economic conditions due to COVID-19. As additional waves are likely, we suggest that administrators must consider the skills required to manage evolving economic conditions as well as both the supply and demand sides of local economic development.

COVID‐19 is exposing a nexus between communities disproportionately suffering from underlying health conditions, policy‐reinforced disparities, and susceptibility to the disease. As the virus spreads, policy responses will need to shift from focusing on surveillance and mitigation to recovery and prevention. Local governments, with their histories of mutual aid and familiarity with local communities, are capable of meeting these challenges. However, funding must flow in a flexible enough fashion for local governments to tailor their efforts to preserve vital services and rebuild local economies. We argue in this article that the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) programs are mechanisms for how to provide funds in a manner adaptable to local context while also focusing on increasing social equity. Administrators must emphasize the fourth pillar of public administration ‐‐ social equity ‐‐ in framing government responses to the pandemic.

Political fragmentation has been conceptualized as a phenomenon which increases competition for mobile citizens and jobs between local governments within the same region. However, the empirical basis for this nexus between governmental fragmentation and increased competition for development is surprisingly lacking. Utilizing a newly constructed database that matches political fragmentation indices (horizontal, vertical, and bordered) to a nationwide survey of economic development officials in 2014, we begin to fill this gap by analyzing the influence fragmentation has on the use of tax incentives, regulatory flexibility, and community development tools in U.S. cities. Applying the political market framework and a Bayesian inferential approach, we find that the proliferation of local governments increases incentive use. However, more specialized governance increases the probability of using community development activities.

This study investigates the impact of state-level earned income tax credits on local economic outcomes (employment, wages, and establishments). The study employs difference-in-differences and triple-difference models to estimate the impact of these credits at the border of metropolitan areas where one side of the border adopts the credit between 1986 and 2012, and the other side of the border does not. Separate analyses are conducted for specific industries and subindustries. Synthetic control methods are used as a robustness check. The analyses suggest that state-level earned income tax credits do not have a significant impact on the local economic outcomes of metropolitan areas. At least one potential reason offered is that while these impacts are not a direct goal of the program, the credits may not be large enough to realize positive economic gains.

At this point, little is known about local government responses to the economic crisis caused by COVID‐19. This crisis is happening on Main Streets around the nation. This article examines how some local governments are taking collective action in partnership with others as well as organizations at the local and regional levels. What is unique is that collective action is rare as it relates to traditional economic development practices, yet it is occurring and leading to the offerings of multi‐institutional grants and low interest loans. However, some newer supply‐ and demand‐side actions are the result of a lack of resources and need for expediency. Practitioners can learn about these collaborative economic development actions other governments are taking, and how these partnerships can stabilize their local economies. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Economic development at the municipal level often necessitates that local governments make trade-offs between firm- and locality-based strategies. In recent decades, economic development researchers have described these efforts over time as exhibiting certain patterns and metaphors: as a series of waves, as embodying a type of lock-in effect, and as a policy layering process; however, the mechanisms behind these patterns remain unclear. This article draws upon 30 years of economic development policy decision making across the United States to understand what leads local governments to prioritize growth- or equity-oriented policies. We find that equity-enhancing economic development policies are more likely when local governments face less competitive pressure, have greater resource capacities, and experience greater intergovernmental involvement in the economic development planning process. Leveraging these factors can aid governments as they struggle to navigate a more sustainable path toward growth and equity.

Public organizations have explored service-delivery with nonprofit organizations to help alleviate the strain on their long-term fiscal sustainability. This interdependence has ramifications for fa...

Urban sustainability is a burgeoning focus for urban scholarship but rarely examined within the larger context of local government economic activities. Why should cities focusing on cutback managem...

This article empirically tests the impact of failing to account for state-level authorization when explaining the factors that lead municipalities to use tax abatements, tax increment financing, and enterprise zones. Although existing research implicitly assumes that state-level authorization exists, this article demonstrates that this unfounded assumption leads to biased estimates using the 1999, 2004, and 2009 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) Economic Development Survey data on a nationwide set of municipalities. This article refines what is known about the factors, leading to the usage of these three policies before offering implications for practitioners and researchers of local economic development.

This research examines whether business incubators produce a differential effect on the growth of firms. Given that there is no direct estimate for the counterfactual (simultaneously measuring the economic growth of a firm outside and inside of an incubator), the authors use a propensity score matching technique to control for the factors that are related to both firm growth and the probability that an incubator manager would accept that firm for incubation. The analysis indicates that incubators have a significant positive impact on firm job creation, and this impact is not reduced if a matched comparison group is used. Furthermore, this study finds that incubated firms receive five times as many business services (legal, financial, marketing, etc.) as their nonincubated cohort. This may account for the networking effect found in previous studies.

The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been widely noted in the popular press as well as in public policy debate. We examine several of the most prominently made assertions about manufacturing decline and its consequences for deindustrializing metropolitan areas and find not all of them supported by the data. In particular, we find that, given their industrial structure some of these areas performed better than expected, that long-term economic distress was not inevitable, that manufacturing remains an important component in many metropolitan area economies, and that much of the growth in the service sector is based upon or complementary to the existence of manufacturing. We also find that low growth in these deindustrialized areas was due more to these regions losing their market share of individual industries to other U.S. regions than it was to the areas having an adverse industrial structure, that economies that were more diversified in 1980 did not have greater employment growth from 1980-2011 than those that were less diverse, and that declines in manufacturing did result in a movement of jobs from relatively high-wage to relatively low-wage industries and thus a decline in earnings per jobs.

Rubin sounded an alarm indicating that economic development practitioners were less than strategic in their economic development incentive adoption when he declared that developers “shoot anything that flies, claim anything that falls.” This article builds on the work of those who have focused on the determinants of incentive adoption in three ways. First, relying on matched cases of survey respondents to the 1999 and 2004 International City/County Management Association Economic Development Survey improves on using a single survey. Second, unlike previous efforts that relied mostly on ordinary least squares estimators to predict the total number of approaches adopted, this article uses a count model and distinguishes between types of approaches. Finally, this article accounts for city- and state-level impacts. This article finds that economic development decision making is strategic, partly determined by state-level effects, and is dependent on the types of economic development practices.

This article argues that states that do not currently have a state-level Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) would benefit by adopting such a program. Relying on extensive literature, the article concludes that a state-level ETIC can effectively reduce poverty, especially among children; enhance employment by attracting new entrants into the labor market; reduce the regressive nature of the tax system; and bolster the economies of areas with high concentrations of poverty. This article estimates the costs for each state without a current program for fiscal year 2013. Overall, it argues that this program, which is widely supported by many interests, can benefit states greatly in simultaneously achieving several social policies with relative administrative ease.