Operationalizing Regional Resilience: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Interest in analyzing the dynamics of the Great Recession among regional economists has largely focused on ‘regional resilience.’ This concept, while still not fully formed, considers the relationship between regional characteristics and the regional response to economic shocks, particularly the Great Recession. Yet, one key barrier to the development of this line of research is a lack of consensus on how to operationalize and measure regional resilience. Researchers typically make arbitrary decisions on how to define the timing, duration, and magnitude of recessionary shocks at the regional level, confounding the analysis and making comparisons across studies difficult. In this paper, I develop a novel approach to defining the time, duration, and magnitude or regional recessionary shocks. I use methods common to regional economics to decompose exogenous recessionary shocks from the regional response to the shock. Using this method, I demonstrate how researchers can use this approach to conduct regional resilience analysis using data for US counties and MSAs.