Timothy R Wojan
Biographic Data
| ID | 4805206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy R Wojan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy R |
| FAMILY NAME | Wojan |
| SIGNATURE | WOJAN T R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Economic Research Service |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9863-1457 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 170 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Arts avocations and the ‘Leonardo effect’
Cloud computing and rural globalization
Experimenting in the cloud
Viewpoint
Geographical differences in intellectual property strategies and outcomes
The wealth of utility patent data has made this form of intellectual property (IP) protection the primary focus of the economics and geography of innovation. However, in addition to utility patents, the IP expressed in a firm's products or processes may also be protected via design patents, trademarks, copyright, or in non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. Recent research suggests that mixed modes of technological and non-technological innov…
Design, innovation, and rural creative places
OBJECTIVE: Creative class theory explains the positive relationship between the arts and commercial innovation as the mutual attraction of artists and other creative workers by an unobserved creative milieu. This study explores alternative theories for rural settings, by analyzing establishment-level survey data combined with data on the local arts scene. The study identifies the local contextual factors associated with a strong design orientatio…
Metaphors of regional policy
Metaphors of regional policy: cities as engines, multilevel governance in gardens. Regional Studies. Recent work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology suggests a much greater communicative role for metaphor: good metaphor links a paradigmatic way of knowing the world with our hard-wired programmes for surviving in it. From this perspective, the engines-of-growth metaphor underlying the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009: Reshap…
Decomposing regional patenting rates
Patents per capita is a widely used innovation indicator. Rural areas generally perform very poorly using this metric, suggesting that inventive activity that leads to patents is an urban phenomenon. However, newly available inventor-disambiguated patenting data demonstrate that inventions per inventor are roughly equal across urban and rural areas. A critical assessment of the patents-per-capita measure questions its construct validity. An alter…
The rural growth trifecta
Recent work challenges the notion that attracting creative workers to a place is sufficient for generating local economic growth. In this article, we examine the problem of sustaining robust growth in the periphery of the USA, demonstrating the contingent nature of talent as an engine for economic growth. We test the hypothesis that rural growth in the knowledge economy is dependent on the ability to utilize new knowledge, perhaps generated elsew…
The Emergence of Rural Artistic Havens
Nearly all applied research on arts activity has examined phenomena in metropolitan areas. Findings from this past research confirm an arts specialization in a limited number of cities. This paper finds a similar pattern in nonmetropolitan areas, where a limited number of counties maintain or develop a distinct specialization in the arts. We document the emergence of these “rural artistic havens” and identify county characteristics associated wit…
Ambient Returns
This paper addresses the possibility that competitive rural manufacturing is increasingly driven by quality-of-life factors required to attract highly skilled and creative workers. Recent findings that highly creative workers are drawn to amenity-rich rural areas provide the empirical leverage for testing anecdotal claims that these areas tend to contain small manufacturing bases that are more reliant on innovation. This contrasts with the cost a…
Emoting with their feet
Creative class theory posits that creative people are attracted to places most conducive to creative activity. The association of the share of employment in the arts with various indicators of economic dynamism provides plausible support for this conjecture. We explicitly test this conjecture by modeling the 1990 share of employment in the arts at the county level, and then use the residual from this regression to explain differences in various m…
Recasting the Creative Class to Examine Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Counties
McGranahan D. and Wojan T. (2007) Recasting the creative class to examine growth processes in rural and urban counties, Regional Studies 41, 1–20. Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class (2002) makes a compelling argument that regional development now depends on novel combinations of knowledge and ideas, that certain occupations specialize in this task, that people in these occupations are drawn to areas providing a high quality of life, and…
Crisis as Opportunity
The discussion outlines the ways in which crisis emasculates traditional methodology as used in economics by making the core assumptions of this type of analysis (temporarily) untenable. Our critique of traditional methodology is limited to its inability to address this critical subset of social problems. It is important to note that our critique does not extend to 'realist deficiencies' of the mainstream science. Rather, support for an instrumen…
Recasting the Creative Class to Examine Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Counties
McGranahan D. and Wojan T. (2007) Recasting the creative class to examine growth processes in rural and urban counties, Regional Studies 41, 1–20. Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class (2002) makes a compelling argument that regional development now depends on novel combinations of knowledge and ideas, that certain occupations specialize in this task, that people in these occupations are drawn to areas providing a high quality of life, and…
Emoting with their feet
Creative class theory posits that creative people are attracted to places most conducive to creative activity. The association of the share of employment in the arts with various indicators of economic dynamism provides plausible support for this conjecture. We explicitly test this conjecture by modeling the 1990 share of employment in the arts at the county level, and then use the residual from this regression to explain differences in various m…
The rural growth trifecta
Recent work challenges the notion that attracting creative workers to a place is sufficient for generating local economic growth. In this article, we examine the problem of sustaining robust growth in the periphery of the USA, demonstrating the contingent nature of talent as an engine for economic growth. We test the hypothesis that rural growth in the knowledge economy is dependent on the ability to utilize new knowledge, perhaps generated elsew…
Geographical differences in intellectual property strategies and outcomes
The wealth of utility patent data has made this form of intellectual property (IP) protection the primary focus of the economics and geography of innovation. However, in addition to utility patents, the IP expressed in a firm's products or processes may also be protected via design patents, trademarks, copyright, or in non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. Recent research suggests that mixed modes of technological and non-technological innov…
Decomposing regional patenting rates
Patents per capita is a widely used innovation indicator. Rural areas generally perform very poorly using this metric, suggesting that inventive activity that leads to patents is an urban phenomenon. However, newly available inventor-disambiguated patenting data demonstrate that inventions per inventor are roughly equal across urban and rural areas. A critical assessment of the patents-per-capita measure questions its construct validity. An alter…
Metaphors of regional policy
Metaphors of regional policy: cities as engines, multilevel governance in gardens. Regional Studies. Recent work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology suggests a much greater communicative role for metaphor: good metaphor links a paradigmatic way of knowing the world with our hard-wired programmes for surviving in it. From this perspective, the engines-of-growth metaphor underlying the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009: Reshap…
Viewpoint
Crisis as Opportunity
The discussion outlines the ways in which crisis emasculates traditional methodology as used in economics by making the core assumptions of this type of analysis (temporarily) untenable. Our critique of traditional methodology is limited to its inability to address this critical subset of social problems. It is important to note that our critique does not extend to 'realist deficiencies' of the mainstream science. Rather, support for an instrumen…
The Emergence of Rural Artistic Havens
Nearly all applied research on arts activity has examined phenomena in metropolitan areas. Findings from this past research confirm an arts specialization in a limited number of cities. This paper finds a similar pattern in nonmetropolitan areas, where a limited number of counties maintain or develop a distinct specialization in the arts. We document the emergence of these “rural artistic havens” and identify county characteristics associated wit…
Ambient Returns
This paper addresses the possibility that competitive rural manufacturing is increasingly driven by quality-of-life factors required to attract highly skilled and creative workers. Recent findings that highly creative workers are drawn to amenity-rich rural areas provide the empirical leverage for testing anecdotal claims that these areas tend to contain small manufacturing bases that are more reliant on innovation. This contrasts with the cost a…
Emoting with their feet
Creative class theory posits that creative people are attracted to places most conducive to creative activity. The association of the share of employment in the arts with various indicators of economic dynamism provides plausible support for this conjecture. We explicitly test this conjecture by modeling the 1990 share of employment in the arts at the county level, and then use the residual from this regression to explain differences in various m…
Recasting the Creative Class to Examine Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Counties
McGranahan D. and Wojan T. (2007) Recasting the creative class to examine growth processes in rural and urban counties, Regional Studies 41, 1–20. Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class (2002) makes a compelling argument that regional development now depends on novel combinations of knowledge and ideas, that certain occupations specialize in this task, that people in these occupations are drawn to areas providing a high quality of life, and…
The rural growth trifecta
Recent work challenges the notion that attracting creative workers to a place is sufficient for generating local economic growth. In this article, we examine the problem of sustaining robust growth in the periphery of the USA, demonstrating the contingent nature of talent as an engine for economic growth. We test the hypothesis that rural growth in the knowledge economy is dependent on the ability to utilize new knowledge, perhaps generated elsew…
Decomposing regional patenting rates
Patents per capita is a widely used innovation indicator. Rural areas generally perform very poorly using this metric, suggesting that inventive activity that leads to patents is an urban phenomenon. However, newly available inventor-disambiguated patenting data demonstrate that inventions per inventor are roughly equal across urban and rural areas. A critical assessment of the patents-per-capita measure questions its construct validity. An alter…
Metaphors of regional policy
Metaphors of regional policy: cities as engines, multilevel governance in gardens. Regional Studies. Recent work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology suggests a much greater communicative role for metaphor: good metaphor links a paradigmatic way of knowing the world with our hard-wired programmes for surviving in it. From this perspective, the engines-of-growth metaphor underlying the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009: Reshap…
Design, innovation, and rural creative places
OBJECTIVE: Creative class theory explains the positive relationship between the arts and commercial innovation as the mutual attraction of artists and other creative workers by an unobserved creative milieu. This study explores alternative theories for rural settings, by analyzing establishment-level survey data combined with data on the local arts scene. The study identifies the local contextual factors associated with a strong design orientatio…
Geographical differences in intellectual property strategies and outcomes
The wealth of utility patent data has made this form of intellectual property (IP) protection the primary focus of the economics and geography of innovation. However, in addition to utility patents, the IP expressed in a firm's products or processes may also be protected via design patents, trademarks, copyright, or in non-compete and non-disclosure agreements. Recent research suggests that mixed modes of technological and non-technological innov…
Viewpoint
Experimenting in the cloud
Cloud computing and rural globalization
Arts avocations and the ‘Leonardo effect’
Economics (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Economic geography (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Creative class (5 works) · Creativity (5 works)