Heather Stephens

Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth in Lagging Regions

The paper investigates what are the most important factors in fostering growth in rural, remote regions with historically low growth rates. In particular, we focus on the lagging Appalachian region and compare it to both nearby counties and other similarly lagging U.S. counties. Factors such as self-employment, human capital, creativity, university spillovers and high-technology clusters are considered. Our results suggest that entrepreneurship and creativity factors are key to increasing growth in the Appalachian region and in similar lagging regions nationally. However, there is little evidence that other knowledge-based factors are conducive to growth in these regions.

Understanding the Heterogeneous Effects of Gasoline Taxes Across Income and Location

Using disaggregated confidential household data, we estimate spatial variation in householdlevel gasoline price elasticities and the welfare effects of gasoline taxes. A novel approach allows us to model a discrete-continuous household choice of vehicle bundles, while disaggregating the choice set and including vehicle-specific fixed effects and unobserved consumer heterogeneity. The mean elasticity of demand for gasoline is -0.67, but with tremendous variation across location and income. We find that rural households have 30% more negative welfare impacts than urban households from gasoline taxes. Finally, we explore different policies that can help to mitigate welfare inequalities due to these taxes. 1 Elisheba Spiller, Postdoctoral Fellow, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC, spiller@rff.org Heather M. Stephens, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, California State University, Long Beach, Heather.Stephens@csulb.edu

The Effect of Gasoline Taxes and Public Transit Investments on Driving Patterns

This paper analyzes how driving patterns are affected by gasoline taxes and the availability of a substitute for driving—public transportation. We develop a measure of transportation substitutability based on the difference between individuals’ predicted commute times by private and public transit, conditional upon their demographic characteristics and geographic location. Improved substitutability decreases annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by inducing modal shifts to public transit, though gasoline taxes are found to have a much larger impact on VMT. Our results imply that a policy that raises gasoline taxes and recycles the revenues into public transit improvements can have even larger impacts on driving patterns than either policy alone.

Does the Substitutability of Public Transit Affect Commuters’ Response to Gasoline Price Changes?

This paper determines the extent to which gasoline price elasticity is affected by the availability of a substitute for driving—public transportation. Measuring the substitutability of public transportation presents an important practical difficulty. To address this, we predict individuals’ commute times by private and public transit conditional upon their observable characteristics and create a measure of substitutability between the two modes based on transit times. This allows us to measure the effect of public transportation on commuters’ sensitivity to gasoline prices. The interaction of gasoline price with our constructed substitutability measure is found to have a significant effect on annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT), indicating that investments in public transit could play an important role in altering motorists’ sensitivity to gasoline prices and increasing the effectiveness of a gasoline tax. However, we find evidence to support a policy of increasing public transit accessibility only in the presence of increased gasoline taxes.

The role of open access in a changing academy: reflections on a new publishing paradigm

Now that Regional Studies, Regional Science is into its fourth year of publication, we feel it is a good time to reflect on the progress of the journal to date in relation to the wider publishing context and changing expectations about the role of open-access (OA) publishing. This editorial also marks the departure of Alex Singleton, one of our founding editors-in-chief, and the arrival of Stephen Hincks as a new editor-in-chief. Stephen joins Alasdair Rae and Heather Stephens (North American editor) on the senior editorial team and we welcome him to the RSRS family. At the same time, we extend warm wishes to Alex and formally thank him for his role in taking the journal from initial concept to the stage where we now have a growing corpus of interdisciplinary papers and very strong download figures. In fact, as we explain below, some of our papers are among the most viewed across the social sciences, thanks to the OA model and continued support from our publisher (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group) and, of course, the Regional Studies Association. We are pleased to report that in March 2016 RSRS was accepted for inclusion in Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database. This is an important milestone as we are one of the few OA journals in the social sciences to achieve this. Below, we also say more about who we are ‘open’ to, since this is often a subject of some debate and more than a little mystery. In this editorial we also make a renewed call for papers from people working in the broad areas of regional studies and regional science, at all career stages. We remain committed to our mentored route for publication, led by the early career papers editors, but we encourage all scholars – from doctoral students to professors – to submit their work. We offer field-leading review times (currently averaging 35 days) and your work will sit alongside papers by such luminaries as Rob Kitchin (Kitchin, Lauriault, & McArdle, 2015), Alan Wilson (2016) , Ana Rita Cruz (2014), Kevin Ward (Ward et al., 2015) and Martin Jones (Beel, Jones, & Jones, 2016). One particularly appealing feature of RSRS is that we publish a variety of paper types, from our ‘regional graphics’ of two or three pages (including maps or graphics) to full-length more traditional manuscripts of around 8000 words. We are also very happy to accept suitable papers of intermediate length, which are typically contributions of 3000–5000 words. We welcome more technical empirical papers, review papers, policy-focused papers and contributions that speak to a wide audience on

Designing Policies to Spur Economic Growth: How Regional Scientists Can Contribute to Future Policy Development and Evaluation

Policymakers at all levels of government try to design policies to promote economic growth. Many of these policies have a goal of attracting new businesses to an area, as new businesses are considered a key driver of local economic growth. An emerging literature suggests that such policies have heterogeneous effects on economic growth, both in terms of how the effect of the same policy may vary across locations as well as how different policies spur different types of growth. In this chapter, we discuss the insights provided by the existing literature on the effect of government policy on local economic growth. We pose questions that have not been fully answered, and for which the evidence is mixed, and discuss methodologies that future work should consider utilizing in order to answer these pressing issues. We also discuss the importance of data and the ideal types of data that should be collected and analyzed in the future. Evaluating the features and outcomes of policies will continue to be an important role for regional scientists over the next several decades, as government officials seek guidance when designing policy and allocating scarce resources.

Special Issue on Regional Economic Development

An irony of globalization is that its impact is felt most on regional rather than national economies. Over the last few decades, it has been widely recognized that competitiveness is regionally rather than nationally based, and policies designed to enhance competitiveness should be regional rather than national in scope (Scott and Storper 2003). However, research and policy agendas at this scale are challenging because they require tailored local and regional strategies that demonstrate an understanding of the unique role and impact of cities and regions on global economic trends. Researchers and policy makers are responding to this challenge by approaching development questions from an explicitly regional perspective. This special issue of the International Regional Science Review is comprised of six articles that evaluate issues critical to the growth and development of competitive regions. These articles address a variety of interrelated regional issues ranging from human and social capital, to technological change, to place-based policies and innovation policies. The first article in this special issue, by Betz and Partridge (2013), examines the role that job creation plays in driving migration between regions. Place-based economic development policies that aim to create new jobs have been touted as helping the original residents of a region. However, if outsiders migrate into the region to take the new jobs, then the original residents will not benefit. Using data for net migration between pairs of US counties, they compare the results for Appalachia, a peripheral, lagging region, with the rest of the United States. They find that, over time, net migration is becoming less responsive to employment growth, and this is

Economic Distress and Labor Market Participation

&NA; Many of the most deeply and persistently distressed regions of the United States, such as parts of West Virginia, suffer from extremely low levels of labor force participation. These are regions where economic despair seems to have taken hold for generations and which face numerous other impediments to economic prosperity, such as opioid abuse. Better understanding these linkages can lead to policy solutions to help the most disadvantaged places break the cycle of economic despair. Using county‐level data, we begin by estimating a series of models that allow us to understand the drivers of local labor force participation. We also consider how these drivers may differ between rural and urban areas. We then analyze how levels of participation in the labor force are related to other measures of economic distress. We find that there is significant variation in the drivers of rural and urban labor force participation; however, much of the variation can be explained by known factors. Yet, our results also suggest that there remains some portion of the lower levels of labor force participation in West Virginia and Appalachia that cannot be explained by other factors. Since it appears that labor force participation is important to explaining higher levels of employment growth in rural areas, for persistently distressed regions, finding ways to increase labor force participation may be a critical step toward increasing economic prosperity.