Testing Rubin’s Model 25 Years Later

Abstract

Rubin sounded an alarm indicating that economic development practitioners were less than strategic in their economic development incentive adoption when he declared that developers “shoot anything that flies, claim anything that falls.” This article builds on the work of those who have focused on the determinants of incentive adoption in three ways. First, relying on matched cases of survey respondents to the 1999 and 2004 International City/County Management Association Economic Development Survey improves on using a single survey. Second, unlike previous efforts that relied mostly on ordinary least squares estimators to predict the total number of approaches adopted, this article uses a count model and distinguishes between types of approaches. Finally, this article accounts for city- and state-level impacts. This article finds that economic development decision making is strategic, partly determined by state-level effects, and is dependent on the types of economic development practices.