We are far from the only scholars conducting original research into government-run economic development programs. State and local governments have tried to stimulate economic growth and development through a variety of incentive programs for decades. These programs have provided a rich source of research questions for scholars.
What follows is a brief description of select studies focused on economic development programs and that use the National Establishment Time Series database. The economic development-specific studies were culled from both a bibliography of publications that use the NETS database and from other reviews of recent scholarship. The bibliography of publications that use NETS data was provided by Don Walls of Don Walls & Associates.[3] It contains 180 entries, featuring studies as varied as business survival rates in rural areas to “the state of entrepreneurship” in North Carolina and the impact of so-called living wage laws, to name just a few.[4]