Book Description

Place-focused economic development scholarship tends to emphasize metropolitan programs and policies. As such, small-town policymakers must rely on a smaller, sometimes nonexistent body of evidence to guide their decision making as they pursue the goal of lasting economic vitality. I address shortcomings within the literatures of both economic development and planning by examining downtown revitalization efforts and long-term business dynamics of non-metropolitan regional economies. I introduce the dissertation in Chapter 1, laying out its research questions, describing the research setting, and explaining the “connective tissue” that runs across all essays. The first two essays (Chapters 2 and 3) study the efficacy of downtown revitalization efforts by examining the “Main Street Program,” which is a smaller-scale economic development strategy used to revitalize historic town centers across the rural United States. In Chapter 2, I use a difference-in-differences design using longitudinal business establishment data to estimate the program’s causal impact on job growth in downtown retail districts. Using a pooled sample of four Midwest states, I find no significant effect of Main Street Program adoption on downtown jobs or establishments. However, when I focus on each state individually, a substantial degree of structural heterogeneity across states exists. Specifically, while the other three states demonstrate inconsistent effects in response to program adoption, Iowa emerges as a state where the Main Street Program appears to yield its hypothesized economic benefits to the downtown business districts of participating communities. In Chapter 3, I use a series of hedonic price models to evaluate the Main Street Program in terms of its influence on the local housing market. I find that home sale prices are higher for residential properties sold in program-participating communities, and I observe an additional sale price premium for homes located in closer proximity to downtown districts with an active Main Street Program. The final essay, Chapter 4, represents a departure from the focus on downtown revitalization and the Main Street Program, focusing instead on the long-term resilience or “survival” of non-metropolitan business establishments. In it, I examine the role of fixed capital assets as determinants of establishments’ ability to survive an economic downturn. I use a proportional hazards model which estimates the likelihood of survival associated with a business establishment’s proximity to various features of the built environment. I find that two specific locational assets—proximity to a central business district and proximity to a limited access highway—are closely associated with a reduced likelihood of failure (going out of business) in the years following the Great Recession. In Chapter 5, I summarize this dissertation’s contributions to both the academic discipline and profession of economic development. I conclude with a consideration of how the dissertation’s contributions can be improved or added upon by future research.