Completed Projects

The Northeast Digital Equity Summit was held September 19, 2023, and provided an opportunity for land-grant University educators and researchers across the Northeast region and beyond to learn from one another and expand capacity for digital equity programming. Follow the link below to access recordings, presentation files, and other resources.

NERCRD provided advisory support to this effort, which was conducted by Alicia F. Coleman and Mario Reinaldo Machado and commissioned by the Association of Northeast Extension Directors and the Northeastern Regional Association of State Agricultural Experiment Station Directors. Coleman and Machado assessed over 1,300 ecosystem service provisioning programs and policies across the U.S. Northeast. The assessment describes the programs’ institutional arrangements, their incentive structures, and the ecosystem services they provide. Their findings were released in a report published by the Extension Foundation in 2022. In 2023, Coleman and Machado also published their findings Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, and NERCRD provided travel support to Coleman so she could present the findings at the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals annual meeting in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, in June.  

Innovation lies at the heart of most entrepreneurial activity, and the goal of this USDA NIFA funded project was to deepen the understanding of whether and how entrepreneurial innovation can mitigate the growing economic threats facing rural U.S. workers and communities. This project, which ran from May 2018 through April 2023, utilized a newly available dataset that showed innovative activity, broadly defined, is far more prevalent in rural areas than was commonly believed; this dataset for the first time also allowed for in-depth research to examine the roles of different types of innovation in rural firm success. By combining this nationally representative, novel establishment-level data set with detailed Census micro data, the researchers tested hypotheses about the emergence and viability of rural entrepreneurship that could not be examined previously. In addition, by linking the establishment survey with founders’ information in the Census Survey of Business Owners and the Annual Survey of Entrepreneurs the researchers sought to provide unique insights on female and minority entrepreneurship.

Collaborators on the project included: 

• Stephan J. Goetz (PI), Zheng Tian, and Luyi Han (NERCRD/Penn State)
• Anil Rupasingha (USDA Economic Research Service)
• Timothy Wojan (National Science Foundation)

Below is a list of impacts and outputs from this project, which will be updated regularly as the research team continues to write up their findings.

Impacts:

• Through more than a dozen presentations to both national and international audiences made by members of the team, researchers, innovation policy makers, and non-technical audiences have increased their understanding of rural innovation, how it can be measured more effectively, and how it can be supported.
• For example, the researchers found that cloud-based computing directly contributes to business innovation, but rural businesses lacking sufficient broadband capacity to access cloud services are missing out on their innovation-boosting potential. These findings can be used by policymakers and business-support organizations to foster greater opportunities for rural innovation, and they were shared widely through a peer-reviewed publication, a Penn State News release, and several presentations.

Publications:

• Han, Luyi, Timothy R. Wojan, Zheng Tian, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2024. “How Export Performance Is Mediated by Innovation, Owner Characteristics, and Location.” Economics Letters 237 (April): 111657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2024.111657.
  • A related Penn State News article: Innovation linked to international exports for both rural and urban firms
• Han, Luyi, Timothy R Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2023a. “Internationalization of the Rural Nonfarm Economy and the Cloud: Evidence from US Firm-Level Export Data.” In Washington, D.C.: AgEcon Search. https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/335701?ln=en.
• Han, Luyi, Timothy R. Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2023c. “Experimenting in the Cloud: The Digital Divide’s Impact on Innovation.” Telecommunications Policy 47 (7): 102578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2023.102578.
  • A related Penn State News article: Digital Divide Hinders Rural Innovation, Study Shows.
• Han Luyi, Zheng Tian, Timothy R. Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. (2024). “Testing biasedness of self-reported microbusiness innovation in the annual business survey.” PLoS ONE 19(1): e0296667. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296667
• Tian, Zheng, Timothy R. Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2022. “An Examination of the Informational Value of Self-Reported Innovation Questions.” CES-22-46. Working Paper Number. United States Census Bureau. https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-46.pdf.

Presentations:

• Wojan, Timothy R., Stephan J. Goetz, Zheng Tian, and Luyi Han. 2023. “Innovation and Exports: Differences in Rural and Urban US Firms.” Presented at the 62nd European Regional Science Association Congress, Alicante, Spain, August 31.
• Han, Luyi, Stephan J Goetz, and Timothy R Wojan. 2022. “Experimenting in the Cloud: The Digital Divide’s Impact on Innovation.” Presented at the North American Regional Science Council Meetings, Montreal, Canada, November 9.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Stephan J. Goetz. 2023. “How Export Performance Is Mediated by Varieties of Innovation, Owner Characteristics, and Location.” Presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of Southern Regional Science Association, Savannah, GA, April 30.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Stephan J. Goetz, and Timothy R Wojan. 2023a. “Are Some Innovation Self-Reports in the Annual Business Survey Biased? A Regression Discontinuity Test.” Presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of Western Regional Science Association, Big Island, HI, USA, February 15, and at the 2022 Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology Research and Policy Conference, Washington, DC, October 25.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Stephan J. Goetz, Anil Rupasingha, and Timothy R Wojan. 2022. “Is User Entrepreneurship More Inclusive Entrepreneurship? Evidence from Two Micro Datasets.” Presented at the North American Regional Science Council, Montreal, Canada, November 10.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Stephan J. Goetz, and Timothy R. Wojan. 2023b. “Decomposing the Rural-Urban Export Gap: Evidence from U.S. Firms.” Presented at the 62nd European Regional Science Association Congress, Alicante, Spain, August 31.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Stephan J. Goetz, and Timothy R. Wojan. 2023c. “Decomposing the Rural-Urban Export Gap: Evidence from U.S. Firms.” Presented at the 70th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International, San Diego, CA, November 15.
• Han, Luyi, Zheng Tian, Timothy R. Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2024. “How Export Performance Is Mediated by Varieties of Innovation, Owner Characteristics, and Location.” Poster presented at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, January 5.
• Han, Luyi, Timothy R Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2023b. “Internationalization of the Rural Nonfarm Economy and the Cloud: Evidence from US Firm-Level Export Data.” Presented at the 2023 Meeting of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, Washington, D.C., July 23.
• Tian, Zheng, Luyi Han, Stephan J. Goetz. 2023. “User Entrepreneurship and Firm Employment Growth.” Presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of Southern Regional Science Association, Savannah, GA, March 30-April 1, 2023, Savannah, GA, April 30.
• Tian, Zheng, Luyi Han, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2023. “Examining Rural-Urban Innovation Disparities: A Study Using the Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition Method.” Presented at the 70th Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International, San Diego, CA, November 16.
• Tian, Zheng, Luyi Han, Timothy R. Wojan, Stephan J. Goetz, and Anil Rupasingha. 2024. “User Entrepreneurship and Firm Employment Growth.” Poster presented at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, January 5.
• Tian, Zheng, Timothy R Wojan, and Stephan J. Goetz. 2023. “Growth Trajectories of Rural Innovative Firms.” Presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of Western Regional Science Association, Big Island, HI, USA Feb 15 – 18, 2023, February 15.
• Wojan, Timothy R. 2023. “Grassroots Design Meets Grassroots Innovation:  Rural Design Orientation and Firm Performance.” Presented at the 62nd European Regional Science Association Congress, Alicante, Spain, August 30.
• Wojan, Timothy R, Zheng Tian, Luyi Han, and Stephan J Goetz. 2022. “SAIRE sans Satire? The Promise and Perils of Small Area Innovation Rate Estimation.” Presented at the North American Regional Science Council Meetings, Montreal, Canada, November 9.

The quality of rural life is affected by the migration of people into and out of rural communities, the evolution of agriculture and industry, local social organization, and public policy. During the course of this multi-year, multi-state project, the team of researchers from land-grant universities across the U.S. examined the forces that shape rural communities and identifying emerging threats and opportunities. As a collaborative interdisciplinary group, this project tackled multifaceted issues in many states, including natural disasters, food deserts, local foods, climate change, diversity, jobs, housing, infrastructure, and disease. Researchers also anaylized the impact of different development strategies on rural wealth creation, including natural resource-based strategies (such as energy production), amenity-based strategies (like tourism), and knowledge-based strategies (for example, attracting the creative class).

In the wake of multiple chronic challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, rural communities and small towns across the United States are beginning to build back from the associated impacts on their economies, workforces, and communities. These recovery efforts pose critical questions of where and how to invest. To identify where stakeholders engaged in rural development see the greatest need, and the greatest opportunity, the Regional Rural Development Centers embarked on a process to collect feedback through a year-long initiative, resulting in a widely shared report and data dashboard.

Production agriculture has largely been considered to be beyond the scope of cluster theory. As a result, key insights from the theory have not been fully leveraged for agricultural and rural development practice. This study, led by NERCRD TAC Chair Paul Gottlieb, Rutgers University, examined clustering behavior in production agriculture. Using case study literature and detailed commodity data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture, the research team tested the hypothesis that certain known drivers of transactional clustering behavior are also active in agriculture: that they are correlated with observed geographic clustering, controlling for factors like climate requirements and industry size. The research team learned that across commodities, a high level of environmental conservation activities and high diversity of products and services were positively correlated with geographic clustering, controlling for other known causes of clustering. This constitutes evidence for the idea that clustering may be caused by the need to share knowledge on particular agricultural practices, rather than being explained entirely by the existence of common geographic “anchors.” They also produced a report of federal-level policy recommendations based on their findings.

Beginning in 2020, NERCRD invested in this project with the approval of its Board of Directors. The AgriCluster Retention and Expansion (ACRE) Program is a strategic planning program for farmer-led marketing and environmental projects by the Thomas A. Lyson Center for Civic Agriculture and Food Systems, which is affiliated with Cornell University. ACRE provides training in strategic business planning tools and processes that engage all stakeholders in a value chain to work collectively in carving out and defending a market niche.

The framework was piloted in 2021 with a group of New York onion growers, who explored collaborative promotion and marketing. The pilot phase ended in June 2022. Team members report that their work with the onion growers was highly influential in developing the ACRE curriculum and process.

The initial NERCRD seed funding of roughly $23,000 leveraged an additional $144,000 in a three-year grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NESARE) professional development program to further this project. This support is allowing the team to build out the infrastructure for the ACRE Program, including:

• An 18-unit self-paced Moodle course on eXtension Campus on launching an ACRE Project.
• An ACRE Facilitator’s toolkit complete with instructions, worksheets, and a case study to illustrate the ACRE process.
• An ACRE community of practice to expand the use of the ACRE approach to agriculture development professionals in the Northeast and elsewhere.

As of February 2024, 28 service providers (including nonprofit and Cooperative Extension staff) completed the online course, and joined the ACRE Facilitator community of practice, which meets monthly. Another 127 enrolled, putting the program well on its way toward having trained ACRE Facilitators in all Northeast states and Washington, D.C. Participants thus far are largely from the Northeast, but also include individuals from the Southeast and the Midwest, and from as far away as France and the Republic of Ireland.

For more information, contact Duncan Hilchey at duncan@lysoncenter.org.

NERCRD partnered with the University of Kentucky and Colorado State University on a one-year Cooperative Agreement with the USDA Agriculture Marketing Service to research the impacts, adaptations and innovations of COVID-19 on U.S. Local and Regional Food Systems nationally. This highly engaged, real-time project focuses on capturing rapid responses of initial and ongoing COVID-19-related changes in the food system and is designed to support timely innovation by collecting and disseminating easily digestible ideas, best practices, and readily adoptable approaches to COVID-19 adaptation. During the project’s first year (2020-2021), team members publish emergent findings on the project website each month, including sector impact assessment reports for each segment of the LRFS documenting initial challenges of the pandemic on markets and populations and innovation briefs highlighting promising adaptations to new challenges. In addition, the project hosted a monthly webinar series for researchers and practitioners, providing the latest updates and analysis from the field.

This project led by Indiana University sought to build models and analytical tools that will enable policy makers and practitioners to craft development strategies and policies tailored to a region’s characteristics and capacities. The research team expanded theory about regional economic development to include more comprehensive data and a diverse array of academic disciplines, and built a complex computational model that integrates data science and regional economic science. In addition to drawing on traditional socioeconomic information and methods, it made use of data from unconventional sources such as social media, mouse clicks and data extracted from websites via web-scraping tools.

The economies of many counties and sub-regions in the Appalachian Region have historically depended on a few dominant industries, such as mining or manufacturing. In recent years, Appalachian coal production—particularly in the Central Appalachian coal basin—has plummeted. Coal companies have gone bankrupt, resulting in job losses with devastating effects on families, communities, counties, and states. Using state-of-the-art research methods, focus groups, and community-level surveys, this project with Downstream Strategies LLC and the Appalachian Regional Commission investigated best practices, strategies, and policies that local leaders can use to enhance the future economic prospects of coal-impacted communities throughout the Appalachian Region. It resulted in a Technical Report and a Guidebook for Practitioners.