Over the past decade, the welfare evaluation of local economic development activities has become increasingly sophisticated. Projected or realized gains have been broken down by wage levels, household income levels, and race. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the distribution...

This article claims that the local welfare effects of employment generation are often treated inadequately in the evaluation of economic development programs. Opportunity costs of labor are often either ignored or overstated, resulting in misleading indicators of welfare changes. Appropriately...