NBER Working Papers by Jed Kolko

State business climate indexes are a popular means of summarizing the “bundles” of state policies that might affect state economic growth. But the rankings of states’ business climates vary wildly, raising questions about what these business climate indexes measure, and hence about which policies they capture are more important determinants of state economic growth. Business climate rankings tend to focus on policies related either to productivity, or to taxes and other costs of doing business. States that rank poorly along one of these dimensions often rank quite highly on the other. Business climate indexes that focus on productivity-related variables have essentially no predictive power for economic growth. In contrast, business climate indexes focusing on taxes and costs predict growth...

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase employment. However, the evidence also suggests that the enterprise zone program has a more favorable effect on employment in zones that have a lower share of manufacturing and in zones where managers report doing more marketing and outreach activities. On the other hand, devoting more effort to helping firms get hiring tax credits reduces or eliminates any positive employment effects, which may be attributable to idiosyncrasies of California’s ent...

We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods to improve upon evaluations of the effectiveness of state enterprise zones, focusing on California’s program. Because zone boundaries do not follow census tracts or zip codes, we created digitized maps of original zone boundaries and later expansions. We combine these maps with geocoded observations on most businesses located in California. The evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase employment. We also find no shift of employment toward the lower-wage workers targeted by enterprise zone incentives. We conclude that the program is ineffective in achieving its primary goals.

Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantages in production and disadvantages in consumption. We argue that the role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremely important and understudied. As firms become more mobile, the success of cities hinges more and more on cities' role as centers of consumption. Empirically, we find that high amenity cities have grown faster than low amenity cities. Urban rents have gone up faster than urban wages, suggesting that the demand for living in cities has risen for reasons beyond rising wages. The rise of reverse commuting suggest the same consumer city phenomena.