Your Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Your Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

New Research in Health Economics!

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New research from our team is out in the Health Economics journal! Available here: https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4242

The Article is titled “Estimating determinants of healthcare establishment locations with restricted federal administrative data. ” The abstract is below. This research contributes to our Economic Opportunity Mapping Project, in which you can interactively select different counties, regions, or states to see the types of business establishments that are currently there compared to those that an economic model predicts might be successful there.

Abstract

We model the locational determinants of nine categories of healthcare services in the contiguous United States using restricted access federal establishment data. These data enable close examination of rural health services, which are subject to suppression in publicly published data sources. After reviewing differences in public and unsuppressed restricted data and testing underlying data generation processes for each healthcare industry, including the Poisson, negative binomial, and their zero‐inflated counterparts, we estimate marginal effects for four categories of independent variables: place‐based factors, financial access, characteristics of population, and industry interdependencies. Findings show establishments are less likely to be found with high concentrations of Medicare and Medicaid recipients, while agglomerations are associated with more establishments. Nonemployer establishments serve a broader spectrum of people, but the rural poor still experience less access to health care.

New Research on Retirement and the Importance of Staying Active!

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I published some new research in the Journal of Consumer Affairs!

We find a negative association between the ability to complete financial calculations and age, with an even more negative relationship after retirement. This may suggest limits to career extension, or alternatively, that extending some types of careers could provide cognitive benefits.

Regardless, the implication that staying active as we age is clear!

You can see the full article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joca.12353

Economic Opportunity Maps Keep Getting Better!

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Our team of researchers from across the country continues to update the Economic Opportunity Maps to improve their accuracy and to add more industries. Our research team include faculty from Texas A&M, Iowa State University, University of Wyoming, and Michigan State University.

Check out the new updates at either of the links below!

https://communities.tamu.edu/economic-opportunity-maps/

https://www.canr.msu.edu/economic_development/economic-opportunity-maps/

Economic Opportunity Maps Update!

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Our team’s Economic Opportunity Maps project has been updated! The maps have been cleared up and some details on the methods have been added.

See the embedded and interactive maps here: https://communities.tamu.edu/economic-opportunity-maps/

The project was supported by the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), award number 2017-67023-26242.

Economic Opportunity Maps Entering Testing Phase

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My Economic Opportunity Maps project is entering its testing phase!

See the embedded and interactive maps here: https://communities.tamu.edu/economic-opportunity-maps/

The project was supported by the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), award number 2017-67023-26242.

New Research on the Importance of Local Banks to Rural Communities!

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Access to financial capital is vital for the sustainability of the local business sector. Recent
research on the restructuring of the financial industry from local owned banks to interstate conglomerates
has raised questions about the impact on local economies, especially in rural areas. We examine the im-
pact of bank ownership concentration on business formations, continuations, and deaths in metropolitan,
micropolitan, and rural U.S. counties. Using limited-access Census data, we find that local bank
concentration is positively related to business births and deaths, or churn, in rural counties, but the opposite
effects occur in metropolitan areas.
Read more here:

New Research on the Positive Effects of Latino-owned Businesses!

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The expansion of ethnic minorities evokes policy debate about their impact on the local economy, driving a need to measure their effects. We employ the confidential US Census data to investigate drivers of local economic performance with emphasis on the role of Latino-owned businesses (LOB) on convergence. The model also includes a number of controls. The model produces direct, indirect, and total impact estimates, and expected values for the non-LOB controls. The estimated total impact of LOB employment on county-level average annual growth rates is significant and positive, but a rurality interaction carries the opposite sign, such that the total impact in rural areas is negative.

Read the full article here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-019-00942-x

How Important Are Local Banks in Your Region? Read our new research here!

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Access to financial capital is vital for the sustainability of the local business sector in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan communities. Recent research on the restructuring of the financial industry from local owned banks to interstate conglomerates has raised questions about the impact on rural economies. In this paper, we begin our exploration of the Market Concentration Hypothesis and the Local Bank Hypothesis. The former proposes that there is a negative relationship between the percent of banks that are locally owned in the local economy and the rate of business births and continuations, and a positive effect on business deaths, while that latter proposes that there is a positive relationship between the percent of banks that are locally owned in the local economy and the rate of business births and continuations, and a negative effect on business deaths. To examine these hypotheses, we examine the impact of bank ownership concentration (percent of banks that are locally owned in a commuting zone) on business establishment births and deaths in metropolitan, micropolitan and non-core rural commuting zones. We employ panel regression models for the 1980-2010 time frame, demonstrating robustness to several specifications and spatial spillover effects. We find that local bank concentration is positively related to business dynamism in rural commuting zones, providing support to the importance of relational lending in rural areas, while finding support for the importance of market concentration in urban areas. The implications of this research are important for rural sociology, regional economics, and finance.

Read more here: https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/18-34.html

What Factors Cause Latino-owned Business to Survive? New research out

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This article uses 127,000 observations from three confidential Census microdata sets at theindividual firm and establishment level to investigate Latino-owned business survival. The merged microdataallows us to control for a wide array of personal, business, and regional characteristics. The analysis is basedon hazard model. Relative to base categories, we find the following decrease in the odds of survival: Latina-owned, Puerto Rican owned, and selling to the federal government. Owner education and low barrier sectorshave no effect, while start-up from personal savings increase the odds by 4 percent. The findings informways to expand regional economies through businesses operated by Latinos.

Read more here: https://rrs.scholasticahq.com/article/7933-factors-associated-with-latino-owned-business-survival-in-the-united-states

Is Local Oil Drilling Leading to More Local High School Dropouts? Read more with our new research!

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Researchers and citizens alike question the long-term impacts of the shale oil boom on local communities. Studies have considered the boom’s effects on employment, income, mobility, and human capital acquisition. This research specifically builds on research considering shale effects on secondary schooling. Using county-level data from Texas, we investigate two questions: (1) Has the latest oil boom led to a reduction in local high school graduation? (2) Is this effect different for immigrants, a group potentially vulnerable to local wage effects? Findings indicate insignificant overall effects; however, local oil drilling increases immigrant high school dropout rates.

Read more here: https://doi.org/10.1017/aae.2018.34