Steven C. Deller

Attracting and retaining people and jobs through a high quality of life is an increasingly common community development strategy. Identifying places with high quality of life, and the factors that drive it, remain challenging. This study uses a revealed-preference framework, based on people’s observed choices and behaviors, to develop an indicator of place-based quality of life. We conceptualize quality of life as a latent variable reflected in eight behaviors capturing decisions to move, stay, and invest. Using spatial Bayesian factor analysis, we construct a revealed-preference quality-of-life index that accounts for spatial spillovers and rank 3,100 U.S. counties in 2019. High-quality-of-life counties are indicated by dynamic migration patterns, strong residential retention, shorter commutes, lower homeownership rates, and higher rates of entrepreneurship and family formation. Four indicators, retention, homeownership, in-migration, and commuting, account for 87 percent of the index weight. The index reveals strong spatial spillovers, highlighting the importance of regional context. While urban counties rank higher on average, many rural counties also exhibit high quality of life.

Using a panel of Wisconsin general purpose governments the role of local fiscal policies in economic growth is explored. A three-equation growth model using population, employment, and income as measures of economic growth is estimated using a Systems Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) estimator. Consistent with much of the literature, the data suggests that higher taxes tend to have a dampening effect on employment growth, lending support to the popular notion that high taxes lead to reduced growth rates. Yet, there is evidence that higher levels of service expenditures are associated with positive income growth rates. While the estimated coefficients tend to be negative, they are sufficiently small to be economically meaningless, suggesting that cutting taxes will have no meaningful impact on economic growth.

Over the past several years, state and local governments, along with supportive community organizations, have shifted their focus from exclusively targeting businesses and jobs to prioritizing people. Increasingly, communities are asking, “What can we do to make this a better place to live and work?” Using data from U.S. counties, the author estimates a Carlino-Mills partial adjustment equilibrium model by decade from 1970 to 2020. The findings suggest that, while there is evidence supporting the notions that people follow jobs as well as jobs following people, increasingly the data tend to suggest jobs following people is more prevalent. This finding reinforces the importance of attracting and retaining residents alongside the traditional focus on business and job growth.

There is significant evidence of the positive effects of broadband expansion on various economic outcomes, including property values and business development, with a growing literature aimed at understanding the effect on health outcomes. We contribute to this later literature exploring the effect of broadband access on underexplored health using U.S. county data. After accounting for spatial dependency within the data we find that broadband availability positively affects health outcomes: as broadband access increase, we see declines in the share of the population with fair or poor health and the number of both physically and mentally unhealthy days. The investment of broadband availability not only impacts the overall economy but also community quality of life as measured by health outcomes.

This study revisits how local fiscal policies, specifically taxing and expenditures, affect economic growth. Using a panel (1990–2020) of Wisconsin general-purpose governments, we estimate a fixed effects variable parameter model and find that taxes have a dampening effect on the growth rate in income prior to the Great Recession but a positive effect over recent years. We also find that the impact of taxes on growth varies across community income levels. For lower income places taxes have a dampening effect on growth, but a positive effect in higher income areas. The results suggest that the impact of fiscal policies on economic growth vary over time and income levels. As such, blanket statements that high taxes harm the business climate and hence economic growth are generally not supported by the research.

We examine the association between woman farmers and community well‐being using U.S. county‐level data. We address modeling uncertainty around three measures of community well‐being by using a spatial Bayesian model averaging approach and find that a higher share of farms operated or owned by women in a county is associated with higher rates of new business formation, longer life expectancies, and lower poverty rates. The results are consistent with a growing literature that finds women business owners approach their businesses more holistically, with positive community spillovers.

While states have imposed a set of fiscal rules on their local governments, their impacts on local debt financing are still inconclusive. To address this gap, we first synthesize the literature of fiscal rules and debt financing and offer a robust base for policy discussions and future research. This chapter also provides more recent empirical evidence of the impact of fiscal rules on local credit ratings, borrowing costs, and debt levels, focusing on municipal governments across the U.S. from 2008 to 2017. The analysis results suggest that tax and expenditure limitations, depending on their designs, affect local credit ratings and debt levels. State-imposed bond referendum and balanced-budget requirements may lower borrowing costs and debt levels, but their actual effects vary across different types of debt. The findings offer several policy and research implications, which deserve serious attention given the upward pressure placed on local debt due the COVID-19 pandemic.