There is controversy about whether geography matters mainly because of its contemporaneous impact on economic outcomes or because of its interaction with historical events. Looking at terrain ruggedness, we are able to estimate the importance of these two channels. Because rugged terrain hinders...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

This study provides evidence of the contribution of entrepreneurship to economic development in Appalachia. Using data on Appalachian counties, a system of simultaneous equations is empirically estimated to measure the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth and development. We present an...

The geography of business incubators has seldom been examined against the public aspirations and beliefs that incubators should either inhabit economically distressed areas to alleviate unemployment and poverty (in the case of empowerment business incubators) or proliferate in technologically...

A number of procedures for generating interregional commodity by industry accounts have been developed recently (Canning and Zhi, 2005; Robinson and Liu, 2006; Jackson et al, 2006; Lindall, Olsen and Alward 2006). While each approach shares a common organizational framework, very little attention has been...

Generating employment and alleviating poverty are the biggest challenges for regional economic growth in rural areas of the Northeastern United States. Despite the revival of the economy in much of the nation’s heartland, rural areas are still suffering from high poverty and unemployment...

Recycling and remanufacturing activities are gaining in importance, as a growing population and economy use up and wear out modern products, exhaust landfill capacity, threaten the environment, and discard potentially valuable and increasingly scarce resources. As an example, an estimated five...

The conventional input-output model has been widely criticized, both justly and unjustly, for its limiting assumptions. One of these assumptions is homogeneity of degree one. This paper explores some approaches to minimize this limitation of traditional input-output analysis by removing the...