Our Research

Place-based policy in the United States comprises a wide range of government programs that are spread across federal, state, and local agencies and that rely on public, private, and nonprofit organizations for policy design and implementation. We document how loosely connected vertical policy supply chains distribute resources from federal and state governments to recipients at the local level. The apparatus is the product of 150 years of policy innovation, both from the top down, with the federal government periodically launching major initiatives whose place-based impacts tend to be long-lived (even if the specific policies are not), and from the bottom up, with state and local actors engineering their own policy solutions, many of which have endured and now constitute modern policy practice. That practice includes not just tax incentives for business investment, the subject of most economic research on place-based policy, but support for community redevelopment, workforce development, small business promotion, technological innovation, and regional planning and strategy. Intermediary organizations that connect government agencies to local recipients are central to resource delivery. Because they tend to be created, funded, and (or) run by non-state actors, there appears to be wide geographic variation in organizational capacity for place-based policy. Understanding the causes and consequences of that variation is needed for a full accounting of how place-based policy works in the U.S.

Society’s transition toward more sustainable energy sources is well underway, but substantially reducing the use of fossil fuels in everyday life will profoundly disrupt the communities that currently dedicate themselves to carbon-intensive industries. In his chapter, “Local Labor Market Impacts of the Energy Transition: Prospects and Policies,” author Gordon Hanson considers the potential for adverse labor market consequences from the energy transition and the suitability of existing policies to counteract them. Particularly, he discusses how to avoid repeating the painful adjustment to globalization and automation, which brought long-lasting economic distress to labor markets specialized in manufacturing.

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign-born workers compared to native-born workers facilitates labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. The authors examine immigration’s role in enabling US commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import competition from China. Although foreign-born population headcounts fell by a larger proportion than those of the native-born in trade-exposed regions, the contribution of immigration to labor market adjustment in the study period was small. Because most US immigrants arrived in the country after manufacturing regions were already mature, few took jobs in industries that later saw import surges. The foreign-born population share in regions with high trade exposure was only three-fifths that of regions with low trade exposure. Immigration may do more to aid adjustment to cyclical shocks, in which job loss follows recent hiring booms, than to aid adjustment to secular decline, in which hiring booms occurred longer ago.