The fiscal behavior of county governments in Pennsylvania is constrained by state law. Counties can adopt a home rule charter, allowing the county government to set tax rates higher than the statutory limits. Opponents argue that home rule leads to higher taxes and an expansion of county...

State-assisted venture capital programs are a popular strategy to stimulate entrepreneurship and small business development. This study estimated the number of job-years created from 1988 to 2000 by the publicly- assisted program Kansas Venture Capital, Inc. (KVCI). The impact of KVCI in...

Tax and expenditure limitations (TEL) on state and local governments have been passed with the presumption they will limit the growth of government, raise government efficiency, and increase direct democracy by requiring voter approval of tax increases. Both the popular press and the academic...

In this paper convergence in per capita incomes (personal and disposable) in US states over 1929-2005 is revisited using the notion of relative stochastic convergence and stationarity tests for panel data. According to the results, although the dispersion of per capita income be-came stationary...

This paper investigates the recoveries following the 1990-91 and 2001 recessions on a state by state and regional basis, and examines why different states and regions performed differently over these two expansions. The general conclusion of the study is that, when measured by a six-year Okun...

Most economists conclude that the U.S. regions have converged in per capita earnings during a majority of the 20th century, though controversy abounds over the methods employed to test for such convergence. Using time-series techniques, this paper finds evi - dence that the U.S. regions have...

In this study we examine the impact of lottery sales and the introduction of new lottery games on the retail activity using panel data on all West Virginia counties over the 1987-2001 period. We find that the introduction of video lottery spurred retail activity in those counties that have been...

The wave of mergers, acquisitions and consolidations in the financial industry since 1994 changed the spatial environment. This paper investigates features of core and peripheral metropolitan areas in Ohio. From a spatial perspective, the Cleveland metropolitan area possesses financial...

This paper identifies the states that suffered the largest job losses and the states whose employment levels suffered the least during the 2008/2009 recession. State-by-state performance varied widely during this downturn, with Nevada having the largest percentage job loss, a drop in employment...

The state role in economic development policy has increased as the federal government has devolved selected programs to balance growth and incomes among different part of the country. Rapid growth in coastal states and the suburban areas around many cities, and stagnation or decline in areas...