The Main Street Program is a popular smaller-scale economic development strategy used to revitalize historic town centers across the rural United States. In this article, a difference-in-differences design using longitudinal business establishment data is implemented to estimate the program’s causal impact on job and establishment growth in downtown retail districts. Using a pooled sample of four Midwest states, the author found no significant effect of Main Street Program adoption on downtown jobs or establishments. However, for each individual state, a substantial degree of structural heterogeneity across states exists. Iowa emerges as a state where the Main Street Program appears to yield its hypothesized economic benefits to the downtown business districts of participating communities. These findings suggest that Main Street Program participation effects are not generalizable across states and that implementation and local context matter.

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As part of their efforts to reverse the effects of twentieth-century downtown disinvestment and automobile-oriented development, stakeholders in small towns across the United States look for viable means of restoring the vitality and character of their historic business districts. In this paper, I evaluate a widely adopted downtown revitalization strategy—the Main Street Program—by measuring its influence on the local housing market. I find that home sale prices are higher for residential properties sold in program-participating communities, and I observe an additional sale price premium for homes located in closer proximity to downtown districts with an active Main Street Program.

This research adds to the literature on locational determinants of business survival by focusing on an establishment's proximity to fixed assets. Using longitudinal, establishment-level data from rural counties in the Midwestern United States, we developed a hazard model to estimate the likelihood of rural businesses surviving the Great Recession and the recovery that followed (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017). Two critical survival factors are of principal interest: proximity to a pre-automobile era downtown business district and proximity to a limited-access highway ramp. The results suggest that highway proximity enhances survival for manufacturing, transportation, and wholesaling establishments, as does own-industry agglomeration.For food, retail, and accommodation businesses, proximity to cultural anchor institutions enhances the probability of survival but competitive effects, including downtown proximity, reduce the likelihood of survival. On its own, proximity to a downtown was not associated with higher odds of business survival.

COVID‐19 disruptions encouraged some rural regions to think about proactively attracting newly footloose residents—but would the pandemic make rural areas seem more attractive to potential return migrants? Using econometric analysis of survey data, we find that for natives who had left the study region, attitudes about living in rural areas during COVID were lower on average than for those who stayed. Interestingly, we do find that owning a business and having a stronger sense of belonging are both associated with positive attitudinal shifts towards rural living, which has practical implications for rural migration policy.