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The impacts of employment in the coal industry remain controversial. Few studies have investigated these impacts over the decade of the great recession and in light of the nation's changing energy economy. We bring together two long-standing rural sociological traditions to address debates framed at the national level and for Appalachian communities facing the throes of transition from the coal industry. Building from rural sociology's "poverty and place" tradition and from natural resources sociology, we examine the relationship between coal employment and communities' economic well-being as indicated by poverty, household income, and unemployment. The study spans U.S. and Appalachian counties from 1990 to 2010. U.S. counties with greater coal employment in 1990 had lower income and higher poverty in 2000. Overall, however, coal employment's effect is mixed in the 1990-2000 decade. By contrast, for the recent 2000-2010 decade, coal employment is positively associated with indicators of well-being. In Appalachia, fewer employment alternatives outside mining are related to higher well-being. Our findings extend the poverty and place literature and the natural resources literature and underscore why a just transition away from coal should focus on moving communities toward sectors offering better future livelihoods. * This study was partially supported by the Appalachian Research Initiative for Environmental Science (ARIES). ARIES is an industrial affiliates program at Virginia Tech, supported by members that include companies in the energy sector. The research under ARIES is conducted by independent researchers in accordance with the policies on scientific integrity of their institutions. The views, opinions, and recommendations expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not imply any endorsement by ARIES employees, other ARIES-affiliated researchers, or industrial members. This study has not been read or reviewed by ARIES officials. Information about ARIES can be found at

U.S. states and localities often engage in economic development policies using incentives and abatements for specific firms or industries. Yet, there is very little empirical evidence suggesting that such policies are successful. Why, then, do governments engage in these policies? In order to answer this question, we employ a model that considers not only geographic and economic factors, but also, in a novel application, local political conditions. A unique survey of U.S. county governments forms the basis for our empirical assessment of both traditional economic development policies and new‐wave policies. Using probit, Poisson, negative binomial, and spatial econometric models, we find evidence that the use of incentives is inversely related to local economic conditions. Furthermore, we find Republican counties are more apt to use incentives, though counties dominated by one political party are less likely to use them.

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Regional policy‐makers have long sought to attract highly‐educated workers with a view to stimulating economic growth and vibrancy. Previous studies over the decades leading up to the new millennium show human capital divergence across cities, where the share of college graduates grew faster in cities that had larger initial shares of college‐educated workers. However, labour markets have changed significantly post‐2000, likely affecting migration decisions of highly‐skilled workers. Additionally, past studies have not controlled for important changes in industry education levels and overall industry composition that may influence city‐level college graduate growth. We use detailed 4‐digit NAICS industry employment data combined with public micro‐data to construct measures of industry skill upgrading and changes in industry composition to control for their effects on human capital growth. We find agglomeration forces, rather than initial graduate share, explains college‐graduate share growth post‐2000. We also decompose graduates into bachelors and postgraduate degree holders to determine whether different forces are at play on growth of graduates at different education levels.

Economic development policies often revolve around supporting small businesses and new firm creation as they are locally grown and likely can be more influenced by state and local policy. Two prominent strands of current research-the regional economic growth and small business/entrepreneurship literatures-elucidate the importance of small, young firms for regional economic performance and the crucial role urban-rural proximity plays in the distribution of growth across space. Keeping these two research traditions in mind, we study the effects of self-employment on job growth in US counties. Our goal is to estimate the net employment spillovers from changes in self-employment (SE) and to compare them to spillovers from changes in wage and salary employment (WS). We ask the following research questions: Do exogenous net changes (shocks) in SE spur larger or smaller changes in employment than do equal changes in WS employment and do these effects vary across the rural-urban hierarchy? The answers to these questions are of paramount importance in devising economic development strategy across urban and rural settings. We use a differencing strategy and an exogenous measure of SE and WS employment shocks to estimate net multiplier effects and to investigate their relationship with proximity to differing-sized urban centers. The analysis uses US county-level data spanning the 2001-2013 period. The results confirm the importance of self-employment for job creation, supporting both more SE and WS employment. Distance from urban centers generally offers protection that promotes SE growth but hinders WS employment growth. In an austere fiscal environment, spending a dollar to stimulate SE is likely to have greater returns as opposed to stimulating WS employment.

The rise in drug overdose deaths in the United States since the turn of the millennium has been extraordinary. A popular narrative paints a picture whereby opioid overdoses among white, male, lesseducated, rural workers have been caused by reduced economic opportunities borne by such people. In this article, we causally test the validity of this theory by using Bartik-type variables to explore the relationship between local economic conditions and county opioid overdose death rates. We add to the literature by exploring how both employment and wage growth in different types of industries are related to opioid overdose deaths for the population as a whole, as well as for rural (vs. urban), male (vs. female) and white (vs. black) populations. We find mixed evidence. Our results confirm that wage and employment growth in industries more likely to employ low-skill workers are important protective factors for rural, white males. However, we also find evidence that economic improvements in low-skill industries are just as important in protecting blacks and women against opioid overdoses, and for workers in metro counties. We also find evidence that employment growth in high-paying industries has led to increases in opioid overdoes rates.

In this article, we explore how local employment growth in the urban-rural continuum is affected by economic trends in industries that comprise local economies and by growth in nearby metropolitan areas. Our county-level analyses reveal heterogeneous responses. Favorable economic changes due to a fast-growing local industry mix have the largest positive impact on self-employment growth in small metropolitan areas and the smallest positive impact in rural counties. Self-employment in rural counties is fostered by growth in nearby small metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and is hampered by growth in nearby large MSAs. In micropolitan counties that are close to small and medium growing MSAs, local self-employment tends to grow faster, while growth in nearby large MSAs has no effect. In urban counties, growth in a nearby large MSA is not related to local self-employment growth in the lower tiers of the urban hierarchy.