EVALUATION WITHOUT BIAS: A METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON PERFORMANCE MEASURES FOR BUSINESS INCUBATORS

Business growth and formation are fundamental drivers of job crea-tion and economic growth. Business incubators provide a nurturing environment, through an array of business support resources and services, where entrepre-neurs, start-ups, and small businesses can commercially validate and transform their ideas and concepts into viable and tangible products and services. Despite growing attention to evaluate the performance and impact of business incuba-tors, the existing literature continues to suffer from methodological, theoretical, and empirical limitations. In particular, existing performance measures have inherent biases that lead them to underestimate the role of business incubators in entrepreneurship and economic development in economically distressed are-as, which typically face disadvantageous local economic conditions. The pur-pose of this paper is to explain the need for better performance measures and the difficulties in creating them.ECONOMICALLY DISTRESSED AREAS, BUSINESS START-UPS, BUSINESS INCUBATORS

AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE LINK BETWEEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN WEST VIRGINIA

Community/Rural/Urban Development,

ANALYSIS OF RURAL QUALITY OF LIFE AND HEALTH: A SPATIAL APPROACH

This paper examines the relationship between quality of life, health and several socioeconomic variables. The analysis utilizes empirical data obtained from a survey questionnaire administered on a random sample of over 2000 residents in twenty-one counties in West Virginia, and spatial data obtained by geocoding the survey respondents' addressees. Quality of life is measured by a three-point categorical measure of overall satisfaction and an ordered probit model is used to examine the relationships. The empirical results are consistent with the theoretical predictions and indicate, for instance, that quality of life satisfaction increases with income and education while it decreases with unemployment.Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics,

Numerical Simulations of Dynamos Generated in Spherical Couette Flows

We numerically investigate the efficiency of a spherical Couette flow at generating a self-sustained magnetic field. No dynamo action occurs for axisymmetric flow while we always found a dynamo when non-axisymmetric hydrodynamical instabilities are excited. Without rotation of the outer sphere, typical critical magnetic Reynolds numbers $Rm_c$ are of the order of a few thousands. They increase as the mechanical forcing imposed by the inner core on the flow increases (Reynolds number $Re$). Namely, no dynamo is found if the magnetic Prandtl number $Pm=Rm/Re$ is less than a critical value $Pm_c\sim 1$. Oscillating quadrupolar dynamos are present in the vicinity of the dynamo onset. Saturated magnetic fields obtained in supercritical regimes (either $Re>2 Re_c$ or $Pm>2Pm_c$) correspond to the equipartition between magnetic and kinetic energies. A global rotation of the system (Ekman numbers $E=10^{-3}, 10^{-4}$) yields to a slight decrease (factor 2) of the critical magnetic Prandtl number, but we find a peculiar regime where dynamo action may be obtained for relatively low magnetic Reynolds numbers ($Rm_c\sim 300$). In this dynamical regime (Rossby number $Ro\sim -1$, spheres in opposite direction) at a moderate Ekman number ($E=10^{-3}$), a enhanced shear layer around the inner core might explain the decrease of the dynamo threshold. For lower $E$ ($E=10^{-4}$) this internal shear layer becomes unstable, leading to small scales fluctuations, and the favorable dynamo regime is lost. We also model the effect of ferromagnetic boundary conditions. Their presence have only a small impact on the dynamo onset but clearly enhance the saturated magnetic field in the ferromagnetic parts. Implications for experimental studies are discussed

An Analysis of Administrative “Best Practices” in the Administration of Business Incubators

A large body of scholarly work has been published on “best practices” in the administration of business incubators. These strategies for the operation of the facilities outline ideal administrative policies and procedures that are not always practical for the operation of all business incubators. Using data acquired from a nationwide survey of business incubators this paper investigates the use of “best practices” identified by scholars in the management of operating business incubators. This research uses frequency analysis and cross tabulation to analyze the “best practices” variables of the survey. The analysis illustrates compliance and use of these “best practices is not uniform in the administration of business incubators. Compliance with these administrative “best practices” is selective. There are variances in the utilization of each of the policies and procedures set forth by “best practices” for administration of business incubators. These variances are reflected in not only practices of each incubator but there are also variances in compliance by size of the community

A SPATIAL MODEL OF REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN EMPLOYMENT GROWTH IN APPALACHIA

In this study, a spatial equilibrium model of employment growth is developed and empirically estimated by Generalized Spatial Two-Stage Least Squares (GS2SLS) estimator using cross-sectional data from Appalachian counties for 1990-2000. Besides the existence of spatial spillover effects, the results suggest that agglomerative effects that arise from the demand and the supply side contribute to employment growth in the study area during the study period. The policy implications of the findings are: (1) Regional cooperation of counties and communities is advisable and may in fact be necessary to design effective policies to encourage employment growth; and (2) Policy makers at the county level may need to design policies that can attract people with high endowments of human capital and higher income into their respective counties.APPALACHIA, EMPLOYMENT GROWTH, SPATIAL MODEL

Implicit regional economic goals and objectives: A study of U.S. development programs

At the present time, U.S. regional economic development policies tend to be focused on sectors, infrastructure, human capital, innovation capability, or to be problem oriented, and only a few programs can be described as being place-based. In this paper, we are looking at major federal regional development programs to deduce their combined implicit place-based goals and objectives. Because the U.S. seems to be relatively unique among OECD countries in its scant use of place-based policies, we compare the United States to, in particular, Canada to gain further insights into the reasons for and potential effects of such policy differences

A Spatial Panel Simultaneous-Equations Model of Business Growth, Migration Behavior, Local Public Services and Household Income in Appalachia

In this paper we develop a spatial panel simultaneous-equations model of business growth, migration behavior, local public services and median household income in a partial lag-adjustment growth-equilibrium framework and utilizing a one-way error component model for the disturbances. This model is an extension of the jobs follow people or people follow jobs literature and it improved previous models in the growth-equilibrium tradition by: (1) explicitly modeling local government and regional income in the growth process; (2) explicitly modeling gross in-migration and gross out-migration separately in order to spell out the differential effects, which used to be glossed over under net population change in previous studies; (3) explicitly incorporating both spatially lagged dependent variables and spatially lagged error terms to account for spatial spillover effects in the data set; and (4) extending and generalizing the modeling and estimation of simultaneous systems of spatially interrelated cross sectional equations into a panel data setting. To estimate the model, we develop a five-step new estimation strategy by generalizing the Generalized Spatial Three-Stage Least Squares (GS3SLS) approach outlined in Kelejian and Prucha (2004) into a panel data setting. The empirical implementation of the model uses county-level data from the 418 Appalachian counties for 1980-2000. Generally, the results from these model estimations are consistent with the theoretical expectations and empirical findings in the equilibrium growth literature and provide support to the basic hypotheses of this study. First, the estimates show the existence of feedback simultaneities among the endogenous variables of the model. Second, the results also show the existence of conditional convergence with respect to the respective endogenous variable of each equation of the model and the speed of adjustment parameters are generally comparable to those in literature. Third, the results from the parameter estimation of the model indicate the existence of spatial autoregressive lag effects and spatial cross-regressive lag effects with respect to the endogenous variables of the model. One of the key conclusions is that sector specific policies should be integrated and harmonized in order to give the desirable outcome. Besides, regionally focusing resources for development policy may yield greater returns than treating all locations the same.Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Valuing Community Attributes in Rural Counties in West Virginia: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis

The study used Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to examine community attributes of rural counties in West Virginia using variables determining quality of life. This analysis was done to understand the value of the social and economic characteristics associated with different communities as migration patterns in the US are mostly attributed to community characteristics determining the residents’ valuation of the quality of life in an area. County level data was used to identify counties that are inefficient, measured in terms of socioeconomic factors. The data is composed of output variables representing desirable community attributes and input variables representing the undesirable characteristics. Analysis was done by using Data Envelopment Analysis to calculate efficiency scores among rural counties in the State as quantitative measures of the efficient production of quality of life within communities. The results show that the majority of the rural counties in the State lie on the efficiency frontier, while others are classified to be inefficient. The research findings are of interest to policy makers as indicators of community performance which can be used for evaluating counties in terms of quality of life