This is a draft paper, submitted in advance of presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association.

Are working-age rural migrants to urban areas really better off? This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1979 to 1997 to answer this question. It builds on literature by Fisher (2005, 2007) on the role of unmeasured characteristics in influencing rural residential...

Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

The presentation deals with the quantification of villages' and rural communities' conditions. Distributing financial sources of rural development among the regions is not an easy task. The authors confirm the fact that the results of different methods used for quantifying conditions may be...