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Discussion Paper
How Different Are Rural and Urban Small Businesses?
Small businesses play a big part in rural communities. In addition to serving local demand, businesses with fewer than 500 employees account for over half of rural employment. As part of the Richmond Fed's mission to strengthen the economy and our communities, we work to understand economic and business conditions in small towns and rural communities. This includes understanding how rural businesses in the Fifth District are faring and keeping a pulse on the financial health of rural small businesses. Using newly released data from the Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), a national data ...
Report
Workforce skills across the urban-rural hierarchy
This paper examines differences in the skill content of work throughout the United States, ranging from densely populated city centers to isolated and sparsely populated rural areas. To do so, we classify detailed geographic areas into categories along the entire urban-rural hierarchy. An occupation-based cluster analysis is then used to measure the types of skills available in the regional workforce, which allows for a broader measure of human capital than is captured by conventional measures. We find that the occupation clusters most prevalent in urban areas?scientists, engineers, and ...