Theses and Dissertations Collection

This research focuses on developing a single economic efficiency metric to gage the economic development for United States counties. This is done by creating factor scores of variables commonly associated with economic development in the community capitals framework and using data envelopment analysis to create the previously mentioned metric. Our results indicate that highly urbanized counties and predominately rural counties are often the most efficient at converting community capital resources into economic output, but these counties may be vulnerable to exogenous economic shocks. Interestingly, some high capital resource endowment counties, both rural and urban, may have benefited more by having higher economic inefficiency for resource-to-output conversion and be more resilient to such exogenous shocks.