Tourism promotion represents popular public policy because of its focus on image improvement. After all, what politician would criticize efforts to “boost†the perception of one’s own state and advertise the resources that draw attention, visitation, and positive notoriety?...

For the past fifty years, states of the American South have been competing with one another in order to recruit businesses to locate within their borders. While previous research has focused on assessing the short-term success of a tax-based recruitment plan, this paper addresses an important...

The focus of this research is to address the question of nonagricultural employment di-versity at the state level for 2002, employing the newer 3-digit North American Industry Clas-sification System (3-digit NAICS). The index of diversity used is the Simpson index. A second facet of the paper...

Retirees represent a strategic issue for rural areas as their numbers grow in proportion to the total population. In order to assess their impact on economic development, a hybrid model, a mixture of Keynesian and economic base theories, was constructed. It was applied to three communities of...

This study examines changes in Nashville’s labor market following the April 16, 1998 tornado. Specifically, the study focuses on whether or not employment growth experienced a change in mean around the time of the tornado. A time series intervention model that allows for timevarying...

This paper utilizes data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Survey (OES) to estimate relative cost-of-living (COL) indices for each state. Information Technology (IT) activity (as opposed to industry) is defined by employment in computer and math-related...

This paper explores whether in-kind benefits influence the labor supply decisions of pharmacists. Particular attention is paid to decisions to supply more than thirty hours of labor per week, when in-kind benefits are usually standard. A distinction is also made between pharmacists in managerial...

In this paper, we develop four paradigms of rural poverty. These paradigms were designed to help explain how different factors interact and result in significant numbers of rural poor­, poverty that persists even though the national economy has experienced sustained economic growth for over six...