Community Economic Development

Join us for a virtual webinar as we explore the findings of business owners regarding their awareness, attitudes, aspirations, and preparedness for business succession and transition with guest presenter, Michael Darger.

Join us for a professional development training for business service providers who work with new immigrants and newcomers in Wisconsin, covering topics related to employment and entrepreneurship. Continuing legal education credit available.

In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty published “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” revitalizing the debate around income inequality. Concerns about how the benefits of economic growth are distributed across the population have been discussed for decades, if not centuries. The most common concern is that higher-income individuals benefit disproportionately from economic growth, with the benefits trickling down slowly to lower-income individuals. In other words, as the economy grows, the distribution of income tends to skew towards higher-income individuals.

The Pew Research Center recently released its semi-regular report on income distribution across the United States. The report notes that the middle class makes up a smaller portion of households than it once did, in part because the proportion of households in the upper income group has increased from 11% in 1970 to 19% in 2023, but also because the proportion of households in the lower income group has grown from 27% to 30% of U.S. household in that same time period.

Wisconsin’s Rural Entrepreneurial Venture (REV) program launched on June 3rd with its inaugural cohort diving into the first phase known as eReady. Each WI REV community’s leadership team started their journey with an orientation meeting that included their WI REV coach and eReady coach to learn about the eReady three-month process and to start reviewing the Ord, NE case study.

Between May 30-31, over two hundred rural economic developers, community leaders, and entrepreneurs descended upon Platteville, WI, a small town in southwestern Wisconsin, population of 11,840, for Wisconsin’s first Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC) Conference. Known as a conference “about small towns, for small towns,” the CEC conference offers programming, discussion, and networking for stakeholders in Wisconsin’s rural business development.

Wisconsin’s Rural Entrepreneurial Venture (REV) program launched on June 3rd with its inaugural cohort diving into the first phase known as eReady. Each WI REV community’s leadership team started their journey with an orientation meeting that included their WI REV coach and eReady coach to learn about the eReady three-month process and to start reviewing the Ord, NE case study.

Wisconsin’s first Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities Conference held in Platteville on May 30 and 31 embodied the very ideas of collaboration and connection that were the focus of the event. The conference offered four different tracks of breakout sessions to appeal to both business owners and entrepreneurial support organizations. The event involved many downtown locations as well.

Between May 30-31, over two hundred rural economic developers, community leaders, and entrepreneurs descended upon Platteville, WI, a small town in southwestern Wisconsin, population of 11,840, for Wisconsin’s first Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC) Conference. Known as a conference “about small towns, for small towns,” the CEC conference offers programming, discussion, and networking for stakeholders in Wisconsin’s rural business development.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded UW–Madison Extension a grant for $1 million to support a coordinated, inclusive, and transparent process that engages communities in siting large-scale renewable energy projects across Wisconsin.

A new program within the Community Development Institute, the Rural Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Initiative (RWEI) seeks to make business development services available to rural parts of the state not easily reached by pre-existing infrastructure.

More than 100 people gathered on March 7, 2024, for Wood County’s first Housing Summit held at Mid-State Technical College in Wisconsin Rapids. The Summit, planned by members of the Wood County Housing Task Force, was a direct response to the calls for action and conversation surrounding affordable and accessible housing throughout the County and Central Wisconsin.

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.

This timely Research Handbook explores the handling of city and municipal finances in the 21st century. It examines the impact of the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic on cities and municipalities, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and avenues for future progress in city and municipal financial management.

The provision of health services in both rural and urban communities is complex and composed of many pieces. One particular part of the rural health care mix that has gathered significant attention in both the popular press and academic literature (e.g., Kaufman, et.al. 2016; Kissi, Walston, and Badar 2021) is the alarming rate of rural hospital closures. Headlines such as CNN’s July 31, 2021 story entitled “[h]ow the pandemic killed a record number of rural hospitals” or Becker’s Hospital Review February 18, 2022 story entitled “[s]taffing crisis, payment cuts put 453 hospitals at risk of closure” are increasingly common.

Using insights gained from Jacobian externalities, we consider how a more diverse economic industrial base relates to business survival rates. While a low survival rate is often perceived negatively among policy-makers, evidence suggests that business exit is part of a dynamic and robust economy. The high opportunity cost of continuing with a struggling business in a more diversified economy may ultimately sway entrepreneurs with less competitive ventures to exit leading to lower survival rates. We model average 5-year survival rates at the county level annually from 1990 to 2012 employing a spatial panel Durbin specification. The data support the central hypothesis that more diversified economies increase the opportunity costs of operating an underperforming new business, thereby lowering survival rates.

Residential and employment locational decisions for working households are frequently commingled. Numerous economic and social factors like job accessibility, wage differentials, housing markets, travel time, trip-chaining opportunities, dual employment, and other quality-of-life considerations influence where a household ultimately chooses to reside relative to places of employment. These choices in turn shape commuting patterns within a region. Using the U.S. Census Bureau’s LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), the authors explore longitudinal changes in the growth of commuting patterns based on commuters traveling 50 miles or more between their place of residence and place of employment for counties in Midwestern states from 2002 to 2019. The authors find that the rate of commuters traveling 50 miles or more appears to have increased in rural areas across several periods and regions. Thus, rural communities concerned about labor supply constraints must take into consideration more expansive geographic labor markets and approach labor force development in partnership across local economic development institutions. In essence, the growth in commuting sheds requires stronger regional partnerships to address the issue.