Now available from our current issue, Urban Economics! A toolkit for evaluating spatially targeted urban redevelopment incentives: Methods, lessons, and best practices, by Andrew Hanson & Shawn Rohlin

This article can be found in the current issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs regarding Urban Economics.

A toolkit for evaluating spatially targeted urban redevelopment incentives: Methods, lessons, and best practices, by Andrew Hanson & Shawn Rohlin

Abstract

This article offers a comprehensive and practical guide to program evaluation methods as they apply to spatially targeted urban redevelopment incentives (STURIs). We review the basic workings of several common program evaluation methods (interrupted time series, differencing methods, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, border methods, and matching methods), citing influential work for each and highlighting choices that specifically apply to the STURI context. We also highlight the synthetic control method as a relatively new tool of interest to evaluating STURI policies. In addition, we put forth a set of primary and secondary considerations for researchers when evaluating STURI policies.