This is the first significant attempt to quantify the development efforts made by state and local governments. The authors' extensive research focuses on tax and incentive policies across the 24 most industrialized states in the U.S.A. and a sample of 112 cities from within those states.

Peters and Fisher evaluate 75 enterprise zones (EZs) located in 13 states to gain an understanding of the overall effectiveness of state enterprise zones. Faced with a paucity of data on EZs that could be used in standard economic analysis, the authors employ a hypothetical firm model in which...