Persky, Felsenstein, and Carlson explore a new framework for evaluating state and local economic development efforts. They propose a method, referred to as the "job-chains approach," that they say clarifies the potential justifications for economic development subsidies as well as the...

Metropolitan Labor markets are characterized by gross flows, much larger than the traditional net measures of employment change might suggest. Standard impact analyses of employment change tend to either ignore these flows or treat them as a matter of 'job churning'. But in a metropolitan area...

Community organizations involved in job training and placement activities have relied on highly aggregated labor-market information to guide programmatic direction. Although such information can serve as a starting point for evaluating employment opportunities, it has not been useful to...

Information on local economic activity is often collected from a list of firms. However, it is difficult to gauge the accuracy of any one source of business listings, given that there is no independent list against which a source may be evaluated. The research presented here constructs such a...