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Theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that fear of violence will cause consumers, employees and entrepreneurs to alter their routine activities in areas that experience a surge in violent activity. This paper argues that understanding how businesses respond to violence has important implications for understanding community crime cycles and offers further evidence of how crime impacts the choices individuals make with regard to where they live, shop and work. Using newly available longitudinal business data and homicide data disaggregated to the ZIP code level, an examination is made of the impact of violence surges on the creation, destruction and growth of business establishments in five large US cities between 1987 and 1994. Controlling for pre-existing levels of violence, it is found that increased violence has the greatest consequences for service-related establishments in low-crime neighbourhoods. This finding is consistent with the notion that the fear of victimisation imposes additional indirect costs to society through its negative impact on local business establishments.

Since the early 1980s, the vast majority of states have implemented enterprise zones. This paper analyzes urban zones in six states, examining the factors that states use to choose zone locations and the subsequent effect of the zones on business activity and employment. The source of outcome data is the U.S. Bureau of Census' longitudinal research database (LRD), which tracks manufacturing establishments over time. Matched sample and geographic comparison groups are created to measure the impact of zone policy on employment, establishment, shipment, payroll, and capital spending outcomes. Consistent with previous findings, the difference-in-difference estimates indicate that zones have little effect, on average. However, by exploiting the establishment-level data to examine gross as well as net changes, the analysis finds that zones have a positive effect on the outcomes of new establishments and a negative effect on the outcomes of previously existing establishments. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

As recovery from the Great Recession continues, economic development scholars and practitioners are again focused on the pace and the sustainability of recovery, as well as on efforts to minimise the severity of future downturns. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the relationship between industry diversity and economic resilience over time. Using fixed effects models with data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics and the Census Bureau, the paper examines the influence of industrial diversity and concentration on unemployment rate stability in Ohio counties between 1977 and 2011. Results indicate that while more concentrated counties had lower unemployment rates when times were good, counties with more diverse industry structures fared better during times of national or local employment shocks. The paper also finds that there is a relationship between concentration in particular industries and the ability to withstand a shock changes over the 35 years examined, thus highlighting the need to take care when interpreting findings over shorter periods and the need to consider the particular industry of dependence. While local policymakers have little ability to affect industrial concentration in the short run, the paper recommends that highly concentrated counties adopt policies that may help buffer their economies to effects of negative shocks.

Most prior research testing the hypothesis of the social disorganization theory that residential instability increases crime has used cross-sectional data. Using a unique dataset linking home sales address matched to census tracts with crime data in Los Angeles, we test the direction of this relationship using a six-year panel data design. We also test whether crime acts as a generator of transition and decline in neighborhoods by testing its eff ect on property values the following year. Our fi ndings suggest little evidence that home sales volatility in one year leads to more property or violent crime the following year. Instead, higher levels of tract property and violent crime in one year lead to more home sales the following year. Th is eff ect of high crime rates is exacerbated in tracts with high levels of racial/ ethnic heterogeneity, suggesting that such tracts may engender a distinct combination of fear and uncertainty in their residents, leading to more turn over. We also fi nd that tracts with more violent crime one year have lower property values the following year, suggesting a general process of decline.Given the numerous studies demonstrating that neighborhood characteristics infl uence a variety of behaviors and outcomes at the individual level (for a review, see Sampson et al. 2002), social scientists have expended considerable effort in trying to understand the social processes responsible for these relationships. Though the majority of ecological research has focused on the impact of concentrated disadvantage as the primary structural dimension that affects outcomes, the roles of residential stability and home ownership, along with ethnic heterogeneity, have also garnered signifi cant attention. Each of these is explicitly linked to mobility, as the fl ow of people into and out of neighborhoods transforms neighborhoods. With respect to local levels of disadvantage/affl uence, scholars have therefore studied the characteristics of the populations that leave, stay, or enter anew into a neighborhood to explain why some neighborhoods experience an economic downward spiral (Wilson 1987)

Despite the growth in research examining direct economic impacts of terrorism, the indirect impact of terrorism on the stability of local economies has generally been overlooked. Using panel data regression models and the most comprehensive open source database on terrorism currently available to researchers, the paper examines the impact of terrorism on employment and business outcomes in Italy from 1985 to 1997. It is found that terrorist attacks reduce the number of firms and employment in the year following an attack. By disaggregating net outcomes into their component gross flows, it is also found that these impacts are primarily attributable to reduced business formations and expansions.

Our analysis looks at the impact of state enterprise zones in six states (California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) on housing values, occupancy rates, and economic well-being of zone residents. Zones did not lead to increased housing prices or occupancy rates, nor did they positively impact income and employment. Copyright 2000 by The Policy Studies Organization.