Community satisfaction has often been linked to the level of satisfaction with a community's infrastructure, job opportunities and social support networks. Yet, most empirical analyses of community satisfaction have focused on only one aspect of the available theory to predict community satisfaction. In this paper, we integrate multiple models to analyze community satisfaction of almost 4,000 rural Nebraskans. The integrated model indicates that social ties may have a greater role in predicting community satisfaction than had been previously thought.

Research to date suggests that occupation clusters may be at least as important as industry clusters in driving regional competitive advantage. A nationwide mapping of occupation clusters, with data available for every U.S. county and the capability to aggregate counties to a regional level, serves as a powerful complement to an understanding of industry clusters, the major focus of a previous EDA-funded project conducted by partners in this research team. This paper explains the importance of occupation cluster analysis, how 15 different occupation clusters were developed as part of this study, the results and products from the analysis, and the applications and implications of using occupation cluster analysis at the local and regional levels.

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The relationship between the health care sector and the rural economy is of increasing importance. Much additional research is needed to fully understand this relationship and to address some of the limitations of the modest amount of research that already exists. In this study, data from Nebraska were used to create a four-part typology of rural hospitals. Input-output analysis was used to assess the economic effects of each type of hospital on the local economy and to simulate the effects of three different changes or scenarios: an increase or decrease in hospital utilization; the elimination of local purchases of nonlabor inputs; and a change in the mix or configuration of services provided. While the hospital is an important contributor to local economies, this contribution is not constant across hospital types. The total job-related effects ranged from 77 jobs for the smallest type of rural hospital to 1,332 for the largest type. Service and trade (retail plus wholesale) are the two sectors of the local economy most heavily influenced by the presence of a hospital. In today's changing and challenging environment, there is a great need for researchers to create and evaluate the economic effects of a variety of relevant and realistic scenarios (other than hospital closure).

We analyze county-level social, demographic, and economic data in U.S. counties to explore how economic mobility in the United States varies across the geography of the rural-urban interface. We reveal that micropolitan areas—small and medium urban centers—appear to play a unique role in the geography of intergenerational economic mobility. Micropolitan areas help to define the blurred boundaries of the new rural-urban interface, and play a unique and potentially powerful role in supporting the upward mobility of low-income youth. In some geographic areas, micropolitan counties serve as cores of nonmetropolitan America, supporting upward mobility in ways that take advantage of their density and scale. In other domains, they are relatively low-density transition zones between remote noncore rural counties and metropolitan America, supporting upward mobility of low-income youth in ways that exploit the opportunities and reveal weaknesses associated with nonmetropolitan small size, lack of density, and limited technological capacity.