The Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the Council of Development Finance Agencies (CDFA) recently released the C2ER-CDFA State Business Finance & Incentives Resource Center. C2ER and CDFA members can use this to research business incentives and development finance programs across the country.  The C2ER-CDFA State Business Finance & Incentives Resource Center is a national database with more than 1,700 programs from all 50 states and federal agencies. Programs are cataloged and searchable by state, type (i.e. bonds, grants, loans, loan guarantees, tax credits, etc.), category (i.e. tax, direct business financing, indirect business finance, etc.), and business need.

I've been lamenting for the last couple of months the dearth of good policy data sets that could enable analysis of actual policy impacts across states on important topics.  Today, I am pleased to report the introduction of a new database that does just this, although I wish it did so over time and also was open to all scholars, not just the members of the associations which sponsor it.  But, all good things come with time, I hope, and I am a huge supporter of C2ER and would recommend membership.  I've downloaded two sample documents from the website so people can see more of what they'd actually get in this database: listings at the state level and detail about individual policy.  With state-level, longitudinal business tabulations/databases now available from Census and rich, although not yet longitudinal files from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we should see examinations in this area of scholarship expanding greatly.