New technologies for accessing energy resources, changes in global energy markets, and government policies have encouraged growth in the natural gas and wind industries in the 2000s. The growth has offered new opportunities for wealth creation in many rural areas. At a local level, households...

New technologies for accessing energy resources, changes in global energy markets, and government policies have encouraged growth in the natural gas and wind industries in the 2000s. The growth has offered new opportunities for wealth creation in many rural areas. At a local level, households...

In this article, the authors argue that better data and research on rural wealth creation are greatly needed and present a conceptual framework to help guide such research. The authors then discuss five observations about rural wealth creation, based on examples drawn from the recent literature...

Economists broadly recognize that the U.S. rural economy is no longer a farm economy, yet policy makers often justify support for agriculture by stressing the sector’s importance to the rural economy. We use the historically high crop prices in the late 2000s to estimate the marginal effect of...

Wind power development has surged in recent years in the United States. Policymakers and economic development practitioners to date have typically relied upon project-level case studies or modeled input–output estimates to assess the economic development impacts from wind power, often focusing...

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> We explore three trends in rural southern Mexico (Fair Trade coffee, migration, and conditional cash transfers) that could explain the rapid rise in education from 1995--2005 using survey data from 845 coffee farming households in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. Results from a household...

Many studies find that areas more dependent on natural resources grow more slowly – a relationship known as the resource curse. For counties in the south-central U.S., I find little evidence of an emerging curse from greater natural gas production during the 2000s. Increases in population...

Recent increases in farm real estate values in the U.S. have increased farm equity in the form of unrealized capital gains. Exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused different increases in wealth for farmers owning different shares of their farmland, we examine if U.S. grain...