IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/26-48.html

Extending Place-Based Innovation Policy to Rural Areas: Using Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition to Identify Endowment Deficiencies

Author

Listed:
  • Zheng Tian
  • Luyi Han
  • Timothy Wojan
  • Stephan J. Goetz

Abstract

Place-based policy is premised on the idea that productive investments that address endowment deficiencies may release latent comparative advantages, stimulating growth while reducing regional disparities. Extending place-based policy to the domain of innovation is conceptually challenging given conventional wisdom that settlement size is the principal determinant of agglomeration economies that fuels innovation. However, growing concern that more places are being left behind by the innovation economy has prompted greater interest in ways to expand the geography of innovation. Using confidential firm-level data from the 2018 Annual Business Survey, this study examines differences in self-reported innovation activity between firms in rural and urban counties to identify possible endowment deficiencies. We do this by employing the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to quantify the urban-rural innovation gap to better understand the relative contributions of firm characteristics, owner characteristics, and county-level factors.

Suggested Citation

  • Zheng Tian & Luyi Han & Timothy Wojan & Stephan J. Goetz, 2026. "Extending Place-Based Innovation Policy to Rural Areas: Using Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition to Identify Endowment Deficiencies," Working Papers 26-48, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:26-48
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2026/adrm/ces/CES-WP-26-48.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2026
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:26-48. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.