About

Steven Deller is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been a faculty member since 1993. Prior to this, he served on the faculty of the University of Maine for four years. His work focuses broadly on community economic development, with particular emphasis on smaller communities and rural areas. He is also a Community Economic Development Specialist within the UW-Madison Division of Extension and has served as the interim director of the Center for Community and Economic Development. Professor Deller's research explores various aspects of community economic impacts, including mining, women-owned businesses, manufacturing location decisions, local foods as a development strategy, and the influence of taxes and public services on economic growth. His scholarly contributions include co-authoring the textbook Community Economics: Linking Theory and Practices, editing five books on community, rural, and regional economic development, and authoring or co-authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters. He has received several honors, including the North American Regional Science Council’s Walter Isard Award for Distinguished Scholarly Achievement and fellowships in multiple regional science associations. Deller has also served as co-editor of the Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy and is a member of the editorial boards of seven academic journals. His expertise has led to media appearances and guest contributions on various prominent platforms.

Research topics

• Economics
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Industrial organization
• Psychology
• Economic geography
• Economic growth
• Business
• Telecommunications
• Marketing
• Public relations
• Law
• Econometrics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Housing financial stress and community well-being: Is there an urban-rural dimension

  Journal of Rural Studies · 2026-03-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Prosperity Across the United States: Revisiting the Isserman, Feser, and Warren Prosperity Index Using Sequence Analysis

  International Regional Science Review · 2025-09-18 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Why do some places prosper while others do not? Measuring community-level prosperity is of widespread academic concern and public interest. While quality of life research on urban places is well established, insights into the prosperity of rural places are less developed. Further, much of the rural-oriented literature focuses on economic growth, which has the potential to mask non-growth prosperity characteristics. We follow Isserman et al. (2009) in their efforts to measure community-level prosperity outside the growth-paradigm for U.S. counties. We use geographic sequence analysis to build on their “prosperity index” by extending it longitudinally to measure prosperity at four (approximated) points in time (1990, 2000, 2008–2012, 2018–2022). Sequence analysis allows us to organize multivariate, longitudinal data into prosperity sequence sets – what we term “prosperity pathways” – thus highlighting the importance of time and history into a spatially-informed analysis of prosperity. Our findings enable us to confirm what is ostensibly true in that prosperity is a dynamic and evolutionary process with significant geographic variation.

  PublisherDOI

• Multidimensional measures of quality of life: A comparison of methods using U.S. county-level data

  Papers of the Regional Science Association · 2025-11-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Childcare availability and Women’s earnings in the U.S

  Review of Economics of the Household · 2025-07-15 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Extensive research shows that women earn less than men, and mothers earn less than women without children. In fact, the “motherhood penalty” accounts for much of the remaining gender wage gap. Since having children can reduce women’s earnings, access to childcare may play a crucial role in mitigating this effect and boosting women’s income. In this study we consider descriptive evidence of the relationship between childcare availability, defined geographically at the county level, and local women’s earnings. To account for potential spatial spillovers from childcare markets extending beyond county boundaries, we employ a spatial econometric model. This method is well suited for studying childcare markets which function regionally and their local economic effects, as well as for considering variation in this relationship by rurality. We find that in places with greater access to childcare, annual median women earnings are higher as is the ratio of female to male earnings. We also find evidence of interactions between neighboring places, highlighting the reality of cross-community childcare demand and need for regionally-informed childcare policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Are We at an Inflection Point in Community Economic Development? The 4 ^th Wave

  Economic Development Quarterly · 2025-05-28 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past several years, state and local governments, along with supportive community organizations, have shifted their focus from exclusively targeting businesses and jobs to prioritizing people. Increasingly, communities are asking, “What can we do to make this a better place to live and work?” Using data from U.S. counties, the author estimates a Carlino-Mills partial adjustment equilibrium model by decade from 1970 to 2020. The findings suggest that, while there is evidence supporting the notions that people follow jobs as well as jobs following people, increasingly the data tend to suggest jobs following people is more prevalent. This finding reinforces the importance of attracting and retaining residents alongside the traditional focus on business and job growth.

  PublisherDOI

• Local Government Finances and Economic Growth: A Case Study Using Wisconsin General Purpose Governments

  Public Administration Quarterly · 2025-11-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Using a panel of Wisconsin general purpose governments the role of local fiscal policies in economic growth is explored. A three-equation growth model using population, employment, and income as measures of economic growth is estimated using a Systems Generalized Method of Moments (SGMM) estimator. Consistent with much of the literature, the data suggests that higher taxes tend to have a dampening effect on employment growth, lending support to the popular notion that high taxes lead to reduced growth rates. Yet, there is evidence that higher levels of service expenditures are associated with positive income growth rates. While the estimated coefficients tend to be negative, they are sufficiently small to be economically meaningless, suggesting that cutting taxes will have no meaningful impact on economic growth.

  PublisherDOI

• 7Rural Entrepreneurship is Declining … or Is It?

  2025-03-08

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• WIndicator: Understanding Wisconsin Prosperity in the National Context

  Minds at UW (University of Wisconsin) · 2025-01-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Wisconsin is at the center of a national prosperity hotspot, but where prosperity is concentrated in the state and the drivers of prosperity have shifted over time. Prosperity is a dynamic process that changes over time; it is not a static state. There are hundreds of pathways to prosperity, suggesting the need for a nuanced, place-specific interpretation of what makes somewhere a good place to live. Prosperity is not restricted by metro status: rural places routinely have some of the highest place prosperity scores.

  PublisherOA PDF

• On the Brink of Business Transition in the U.S.

  2025-05-12

  book-chapterSenior author

  The average age of business owners in the U.S. has been increasing for decades. The trend is largely driven by the large cohort of business leaders in the baby boomer generation, the oldest of whom reached retirement age in 2013. By 2030 all baby boomers will be 65 years or older. The increasing number of business owners at or near retirement age has led many to anticipate a wave of business transitions as these owners pass their companies to new ownership. The large-scale transition of businesses, however, has been slow to accelerate. This chapter will explore the demographic trends in business ownership as they relate to the transition of U.S. businesses as well as a range of considerations that can positively or negatively impact business succession. We close with a discussion of the opportunities to support business owners as they transition their business to new ownership.

  PublisherDOI

• Is there a link between access to broadband and health outcomes?

  American Journal of Economics and Sociology · 2024-12-07 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract There is significant evidence of the positive effects of broadband expansion on various economic outcomes, including property values and business development, with a growing literature aimed at understanding the effect on health outcomes. We contribute to this later literature exploring the effect of broadband access on underexplored health using U.S. county data. After accounting for spatial dependency within the data we find that broadband availability positively affects health outcomes: as broadband access increase, we see declines in the share of the population with fair or poor health and the number of both physically and mentally unhealthy days. The investment of broadband availability not only impacts the overall economy but also community quality of life as measured by health outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Craig S. Maher

  University of Nebraska at Omaha

  62 shared

• Tessa Conroy

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  47 shared

• Judith I. Stallmann

  University of Missouri

  38 shared

• Martin Shields

  24 shared

• John M. Halstead

  University of New Hampshire

  23 shared

• David W. Marcouiller

  21 shared

• Sungho Park

  University of Alabama

  20 shared

• Bruce D. McDonald

  20 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Agricultural Economics

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1994

• M.S., Agricultural Economics

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1989

• B.S., Agricultural Economics

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

  1986

Awards & honors

• North American Regional Science Council’s Walter Isard Award…
• Inaugural Rural Renewal Research Prize awarded by the Rural…
• Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association
• Fellow of the Southern Regional Science Association
• Fellow of the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association