John C. Leatherman

The Economic Impacts of a Foot-And-Mouth Disease Outbreak: A Regional Analysis

Contagious animal diseases like foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) are often referred to as economic diseases because of the magnitude of economic harm they can cause to producers and to local communities. This study demonstrates the local economic impact of a FMD outbreak in southwest Kansas. The expected economic impact of the disease hinges heavily on where the incidence of the disease occurs. Disease surveillance, management strategies, mitigation investment, and overall diligence clearly need to be much greater in concentrated cattle feeding and processing areas at large feeding operations in the region.

Moving Beyond the Modeling of Regional Economic Growth: A Study of How Income is Distributed to Rural Households

This article discusses the use of regional economic modeling techniques to determine the household income distribution impacts associated with various economic sectors. Determining the distributional characteristics of economic sectors requires identifying the relationship between aggregate factor income change and its distribution to local households. Social accounting matrix analysis provides an analytic framework to track the flow of income from local productive activities to households differentiated by income category. Its use is illustrated with an analysis of alternative economic development strategies for a rural region. To the extent that local economic develop ment policy can differentially influence the level of local productive activity, it becomes possible to assess who benefits by economic growth. Incorporating information related to income distribution allows local policy makers to move beyond the pursuit of aggregate economic growth to incorporate additional objectives that are important to overall regional development.

Improved prospects for rural development: an industrial targeting system for the Great Plains

This research introduces an industrial targeting system intended to improve local decision making related to selection of targets for business recruitment. The Plains Economic Targeting System (PETS) consists of a series of econometric equations that match industry input and market requirements with community characteristics to generate a probability of new business location over a given time period. The system matches location requirements for 78 industry sectors to local characteristics for 414 counties in six Great Plains states. Further, the coefficients generated for a given county are transformed into marginal impacts, providing important information relating to local policies that can improve the probability of attracting a given industry.

Cropland management versus dredging: An economic analysis of reservoir sediment management

Abstract Erosion of agricultural cropland has been identified as a major source of sediment accumulating in water reservoirs. Emphasis is increasingly on finding the most cost-effective ways to control soil erosion to reduce reservoir sedimentation. In this study, biophysical and economic models for the Tuttle Creek Lake watershed in northeastern Kansas were integrated to determine if implementation of alternative cropland management strategies to reduce reservoir sediment are more cost-effective than dredging. In the Tuttle Creek Lake watershed, we found that if the marginal costs of agricultural best management practices (BMP) implementation become >

What Factors Affect Information Technology Firm Location Choices in Middle America? An Examination of Regional and Industrial Variation in Kansas

6.90/t of sediment reduction, then dredging becomes the economically preferred alternative. Meeting this cost requires that BMP in the form of filter strips and no-till cultivation are implemented in a targeted, cost-effective manner, not in a random pattern of voluntary adoption that may characterize BMP adoption in some watersheds. Although reservoir dredging is clearly expensive, our results show that it is not entirely cost-prohibitive on an annualized per unit basis.

Entrepreneurship in technological regimes in metro and non-metro areas

The importance of information technologies in regional economic performance is widely accepted but only widely studied in more populous regions in the United States. Local and state development practitioners and policy makers actively court and promote Information Technology (IT)—intensive industries in rural areas. Despite various promotional efforts, relatively little is known about the specific location requirements of such industries, however, especially in lower population areas of the United States such as the mostly rural Midwest. In this article, the authors examine the location choice preferences of firms in three IT industry sectors in metro, metro-adjacent, and nonmetro regions using a highly detailed data set of Kansas industries. The modeling framework combines both conditional logit and Poisson regression models. The results indicate that average establishment size, industry clustering, labor intensity, and county employment growth explain variations in industry location choice preferences across regions.

Income Distribution Characteristics of Rural Economic Sectors: Implications for Local Development Policy

Entrepreneurship (small firm entry) within a defined technological regime is examined using regional, establishment, and industry characteristics in metro, metro-adjacent, and non-metro regions in the state of Kansas, USA. The results show a distinct variation in small firm entry across regions. The variation is explained by the quality of the labour force, industry clustering, establishment size, labour intensity, county establishment growth rate, and the presence of an interstate highway. The contribution of this paper is the empirical examination of the validity of claims that entrepreneurship in technological regimes is more prevalent in the metro region and decreases with increasing remoteness.