Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Architecture Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Architecture

Symposium Report: Findings From The Research Roundtable On The Economic And Community Impact Of Broadband, Edward Feser, John Horrigan, William Lehr Mar 2013

Symposium Report: Findings From The Research Roundtable On The Economic And Community Impact Of Broadband, Edward Feser, John Horrigan, William Lehr

Edward J Feser

In December 2012, a group of experts spanning disciplines and practice in the field of broadband policy met to discuss how the research community can better serve state and local policymakers and other stakeholders. This group of subject matter experts was convened to examine how best to measure the economic impact of state and national broadband deployment and capacity/adoption building efforts. The impetus for the symposium stemmed from the widespread view that there is a deficit of research, standards, and measurements to adequately inform the widely acknowledged view that broadband Internet is a driver of sustainable economic and community development. …


Entrepreneurship Education In The Research-Intensive Entrepreneurial University, Edward Feser Jan 2013

Entrepreneurship Education In The Research-Intensive Entrepreneurial University, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

Knowledge commercialisation and commodification are important components of universities’ “Third Mission” to contribute to the development of their home regions by strengthening their engagement with the public, private, and third sectors. Entrepreneurship education programmes have tended to develop in parallel to such “entrepreneurial university” initiatives, rather than in intentional alignment with them. This is reflected in the research literature as well, where the analysis of the “entrepreneurial university” and studies of entrepreneurship education have little overlap. This paper examines the evolution of the entrepreneurship education initiative of a single research-intensive institution—the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom—and the ways …


Isserman's Impact: Quasi-Experimental Comparison Group Designs In Regional Research, Edward Feser Jan 2013

Isserman's Impact: Quasi-Experimental Comparison Group Designs In Regional Research, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

Applications using quasi-experimental comparison group designs in regional science and geography have increased substantially over the last three decades, inspired by the work of Andrew Isserman and colleagues in the 1980s and 1990s, robust literatures on quasi-experimental design in fields like education and psychology, a vast program evaluation literature, observational studies methodology in statistics, and the growing interest in experimental and non-experimental (natural) designs in empirical economics. This paper discusses the state of quasi-experimental comparison group research today, with a primary focus on studies in which regions—Census tracts, counties, cities, metropolitan areas, provinces, or states—are the units of analysis. There …


Regional Industrial Structure And Agglomeration Economies: An Analysis Of Productivity In Three Manufacturing Industries, Joshua Drucker, Edward Feser Jan 2012

Regional Industrial Structure And Agglomeration Economies: An Analysis Of Productivity In Three Manufacturing Industries, Joshua Drucker, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

We investigate whether a more concentrated regional industrial structure – the dominance of a few large firms in a given industry in a region – limits agglomeration economies and ultimately diminishes the economic performance of firms in that industry, especially small ones. In an application to three industries using establishment-level production functions and a combination of confidential and publicly available data sources, we find a consistently negative and substantial direct productivity effect associated with regional industrial structure concentration and only mixed and relatively weak evidence that agglomeration economies are a mediating factor in that effect.


El Paso Economic Development System Review & Recommendations, Edward Feser Nov 2011

El Paso Economic Development System Review & Recommendations, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This report, commissioned by the City of El Paso, recommends that El Paso city government undertake a substantial reform of its economic development effort and that public and private sector stakeholders in the broader El Paso region mobilize to create an organizational vehicle for the kind of public‐private collaboration that is driving innovative economic development in many other major city‐regions in the United States. The analysis also calls for a stronger integration of physical, land use, and economic development planning activities in the city and region, consistent with a trend in international best practice in local and regional economic development.


Clusters And Strategy In Regional Economic Development, Edward Feser Dec 2009

Clusters And Strategy In Regional Economic Development, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

Many economic development practitioners view cluster theory and analysis as constituting a general approach to strategy making in economic development, which may lead them to prioritize policy and planning interventions that cannot address the actual development challenges in their cities and regions. This paper discusses the distinction between strategy formation and strategic planning, where the latter is the programming of development strategies that are identified through a blend of experience, intuition, and analysis. Cluster theories and analytical tools can provide useful informational inputs into a strategy making effort and they can also be helpful for programming specific interventions (i.e., strategic …


On Building Clusters Versus Leveraging Synergies In The Design Of Innovation Policy For Developing Economies, Edward J. Feser Jan 2008

On Building Clusters Versus Leveraging Synergies In The Design Of Innovation Policy For Developing Economies, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

This paper argues there are two broad ways policymakers might use industry cluster concepts to inform the design of regional innovation policy. The first, and clearly dominant approach, is to view identified technology-based clusters as targets for growth strategies, i.e., to nurture the growth of selected groups of innovative industries and research strengths in a limited set of regions as a means of increasing levels of innovation economy-wide (termed the cluster building approach). The second is to use cluster ideas to reorient development strategies so that they leverage synergies among businesses and non-market institutions, thus improving innovation rates (termed the …


Globalization, Regional Economic Policy And Research, Edward Feser Jan 2007

Globalization, Regional Economic Policy And Research, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This paper considers two questions. First, are there unique implications of growing global economic integration for development planning and policy making at the city and regional level? Key issues include whether globalization is appreciably different today than it used to be and whether it means anything more, from the perspective of a given city or region, than heightened competition for resident industries and related challenges of more rapid macro-regional structural change and adjustment. Second, what kinds of spatial empirical research and model building would be most valuable to regional policy makers faced with designing programs and making specific allocative investment …


U.S. Regional Economic Fragmentation & Integration: Selected Empirical Evidence And Implications, Edward J. Feser, Geoffrey Hewings Jan 2007

U.S. Regional Economic Fragmentation & Integration: Selected Empirical Evidence And Implications, Edward J. Feser, Geoffrey Hewings

Edward J Feser

The emergence of ten U.S. megaregions—increasingly contiguous spaces of high density development and population capturing a high share of U.S. economic activity—raises the question of appropriate scales for local, state and federal policy and how regional planning as a practice can adapt to an extended and, in some cases, almost continuous economic integration over space (RPA, 2006). Notions of cities as functional economic areas, more or less distinct spaces that operate as independent economic units, are less and less tenable as the basis for planning and policy making. At the same time, the megaregion phenomenon does not necessarily imply that …


Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser Jan 2007

Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

State governments that have elected to make investments to increase the availability of affordable broadband service in rural areas and low income urban neighborhoods should organize their efforts around a strategy that encourages and leverages locally-driven initiatives, rather than follow a top-down approach that seeks to identify and close all broadband service gaps in a comprehensive fashion. A bottom-up approach to state broadband policy has three major advantages. First, it is a conservative policy response in an economic arena in which the appropriate role of the public sector is highly contested and in which private sector deployment is proceeding rapidly, …


Harnessing Growth Spillovers For Rural Development: The Effects Of Regional Spatial Structure, Edward Feser, Andrew Isserman Jan 2006

Harnessing Growth Spillovers For Rural Development: The Effects Of Regional Spatial Structure, Edward Feser, Andrew Isserman

Edward J Feser

Many rural development strategies seek to leverage urban to-rural growth spillovers. This paper concludes that their success depends on the spatial structure surrounding the target rural counties. We develop a county-level spatial growth model to identify the positive spread and negative backwash effects of urban to rural spillovers in the lower 48 states over the 1990-2000 period. Instead of the conventional, fallacious substitution of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan for urban and rural, we consider the urban and rural character of each county. Mostcounties have both urban and rural populations, and we classify each as urban, mixed urban, or rural depending on …


Industry Clusters And Economic Development: A Learning Resource, Edward J. Feser Sep 2004

Industry Clusters And Economic Development: A Learning Resource, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

One of the most widely discussed issues in community and economic development today is the role of industry clusters as engines of regional growth and development. Many communities are undertaking cluster studies or initiating cluster planning exercises as a way to organize development strategies to promote key local economic strengths or to shore up identified weaknesses. A large consulting industry has emerged to serve governments’ interest in clusters and the research literature on the topic is growing rapidly. At the same time, some analysts have likened clusters to another economic development fad that will eventually be supplanted by the next …


Regional Technology Assets And Opportunities: The Geographic Clustering Of High-Tech Industry, Science And Innovation In Appalachia, Edward Feser, Harvey Goldstein, Henry Renski, Catherine Renault Aug 2002

Regional Technology Assets And Opportunities: The Geographic Clustering Of High-Tech Industry, Science And Innovation In Appalachia, Edward Feser, Harvey Goldstein, Henry Renski, Catherine Renault

Edward J Feser

This study constitutes a systematic location analysis of the technology assets of Appalachia. The report identifies and documents sub-regional concentrations of technology-related employment, R&D, and applied innovation within and immediately adjacent to the 406-county service area of the Appalachian Regional Commission. By assembling and analyzing an extensive set of data at high levels of functional and spatial detail, the study reveals localized technology strengths that might be nurtured through focused economic development policy.


Agglomeration, Enterprise Size, And Productivity, Edward J. Feser Jan 2001

Agglomeration, Enterprise Size, And Productivity, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

Much research on agglomeration economies, and particularly recent work that builds on Marshall's concept of the industrial district, postulates that benefits derived from proximity between businesses are strongest for small enterprises. This paper investigates this hypothesis, examining the degree to which local business externalities differ in magnitude and type among large and small enterprises in two U.S. manufacturing sectors. A four factor micro-level production function with oft-cited sources of agglomeration economies (local input supply, labor pools, knowledge spillovers) modeled as technology parameters and dummy variables representing varying definitions of plant size (and type, i.e., single or multi establishment unit) are …


On The Ellison–Glaeser Geographic Concentration Index, Edward J. Feser Jan 2000

On The Ellison–Glaeser Geographic Concentration Index, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

I use confidential employment data to investigate the empirical properties of a recent industry geographic concentration index (and related index of industry co-agglomeration) proposed by Ellison and Glaeser (1997). The results show that Ellison and Glaeser’s theoretical finding that their concentration measures are robust to differences in the level of spatial aggregation in the underlying employment data does not generally hold in practice. This implies that sensitivity testing for alternative spatial units should accompany any analysis with the concentration measures.


Old And New Theories Of Industry Clusters, Edward J. Feser Jan 1998

Old And New Theories Of Industry Clusters, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

The paper reviews the broad range of theories and ideas that constitute, often implicitly, the logic behind strategic cluster policies. The title of the paper notwithstanding, there is no theory of industry clusters, per se. Even Porter’s (1990) seminal contribution is more a theory of firm competitiveness than clusters. There is, instead, a variety of older and newer theories of 1) the interrelationships between economic actors that clusters describe, and 2) the implications of such interrelationships for economic growth and development. Industry clusters have proven a useful way of characterizing webs of relationships between and among firms and other institutions. …