Most discussions of rural health policy overlook the key role that states play in crafting and delivering programs that directly affect the access, cost, or quality of health services to rural residents. However, policies such as regulations embodied in medical practice acts, education programs,...

In this unique study of the adult female population in the state of Florida, we found that the percentage of the women 18 to 44 years of age within each county in the state of Florida in 2007 who had received a Pap smear during the past year was a decreasing function of the percentage of women...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a federal program that provides assistance to low- and no-income people in the United States. Its aim is to increase individuals’ food-purchasing power and improve the nutritional content of their diet. We employed recent advances in...

Hoping to generate employment opportunities for residents, communities often offer location incentives to businesses. But many newly created jobs may go to commuters rather than local residents, resulting in higher incentive costs per local job than perhaps anticipated. In this paper we examine...

This short empirical study utilizes U.S. annual data from 1976 to 2006 to examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and employment in Illinois within a multi-variate framework. The Toda-Yamamoto long-run causality tests reveal unidirectional causal-ity from energy consumption to...

We examine the relationship between migration and occupational segregation for black and white job changers. Using a modified experience good model, our findings from the NLSY suggest that black migrants in good quality occupation matches advance their occupational positions, but do not catch up...

Recent research in urban and regional economics has shown that cities have taken on a polycentric (as opposed to monocentric) form. Much attention has focused on identifying and categorizing the numerous employment centers in a vast number of metropolitan areas. However, these studies have...

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...

It is no secret that much of rural America is struggling economically. Despite similar employment growth rates, nonmetropolitan areas tend to have relatively higher unemployment and underemployment rates and slower population growth rates than their metropolitan counterparts.1 Additionally, over...

In this paper we illustrate how the traditional shift-share model may be readily ex-panded to analyse disaggregate data on various age-sex cohorts of the labour market. Further we show that such results can be misleading unless age-sex-specific labour-force changes are explicitly considered. We...