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The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to gain a fuller understanding of factors that foster community cohesion and contribute to the residents' social and economic well‐being; and, second, to move beyond previous research that used larger spatial units such as states, counties, or aggregates of counties and to focus instead on American small towns (population 2,500–20,000). The data on small towns are drawn from public‐use files and from confidential microdata from various economic censuses. From these sources we construct measures of locally oriented firms, self‐employment, business establishments that serve as gathering places, and associations. The local capitalism and civic engagement variables generally perform as hypothesized; in some cases they are related quite strongly to civic welfare outcomes such as income levels, poverty rates, and nonmigration rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of working with place‐level data and suggest some strategies for subsequent work on small towns and other incorporated places.

In the 1990s, studies have documented widespread growth of immigrants in U.S. communities not known as common destinations in the past. This trend has fueled population growth in some nonmetropolitan areas and offset population decline in other areas. In this paper, we examine the implications of recent foreign born in-migration for rural America. Our focus is on a collection of 59 nonmetropolitan counties where growth in foreign born stock offset declines in U.S. native population and resulted in increased local population by 2000. To understand these nonmetropolitan offset counties, we use confidential Census Bureau data that offer us the detailed geography and larger sample size needed to closely examine spatial shifts in the foreign born population, especially those recently arrived. Our findings illustrate dramatic compositional shifts in the populations of these areas, and suggest new demographic complexity in nonmetropolitan areas in the 21 st century.There is a new and growing scholarly literature that examines immigrants in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States. From early case studies of the foreign born in meatpacking towns (Gouveia and Stull 1997;Stull, Broadway, and Erickson 1992;Stull, Broadway, and Griffith 1995) to recent studies that examine the incorporation of particular groups, such as Mexicans, in new localities (Zú ñ iga and Hernández-Leó n 2005), scholars now recognize that immigrant populations are changing the landscape of rural America. Studies document shifts in foreign born population away from the

Demographic stability in local areas is achieved by maintaining a population core that does not move. However, relatively little is known about contextual factors related to nonmigration. What research exists on nonmigration suggests that the factors anchoring people to places may be different than the factors that are primary determinants of migration. In this paper we discuss the social foundations that anchor people to places and present an analysis that demonstrates an interrelationship between community social institutions and nonmigration. Specifically, we show that the proportion of persons remaining between 1985 and 1990 in 3024 US counties varies directly with the number of locally owned small-scale retail establishments, the number of small-scale manufacturing firms and family farms, the number of local civic associations, and the proportion of the local population in civically active religious denominations.

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In this paper, we evaluate the prospects of small business-driven job creation by assessing the link between small business and population health, an alternative measure of economic development. We combine two literatures from the social capital perspective of aggregate community well-being to model the effects of small-business concentration on aggregate measures of population health. We argue that entrepreneurial culture facilitates collective efficacy for a community and provides a problem-solving capacity for addressing local public health problems. Our analysis demonstrates that communities with a greater concentration of small businesses, ceteris paribus, have greater levels of population health. Implications for theory and research are discussed.