The years following the Great Recession have been marred by several alarming economic trends. The slow recovery of employment, very low productivity growth, and historic lows in inter-regional migration and new firm creation all raise concerns about the dynamism of the US economy. Traditionally, recessions have been periods of intensified economic change, and at best these changes improve aggregate productivity through creative destruction. Yet, the changes that occurred during the Great Recession do not appear on the surface to have had beneficial effects. In this dissertation, I examine the US economy during the Great Recession and recovery from a regional perspective to bring new insights into the decline in US economy dynamisms.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether entrepreneurship is an important factor of regional economic resilience. For this purpose, this study analyzes the regional economic resilience of the regions affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and the 2008-2009 economic recession. It is assumed that some regions in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas where different types of disturbances occurred are effective research areas to examine the role of entrepreneurship in the recovery process.From the dynamic panel analysis, this study finds that entrepreneurship is positively related to employment and population growth in the affected regions. In line with previous studies showing that entrepreneurship can contribute to economic growth, this study adds to the extant literature on the role of entrepreneurship by considering external shocks. However, this study reveals that entrepreneurship does not significantly affect per capita income growth. It reflects that the effect of entrepreneurship can differ according to the measurement used. From the quasi-experimental analysis, regions with high entrepreneurial activities show higher levels of employment and population than regions with low entrepreneurial activities after natural disasters. When other regional economic structures and the effects of hurricanes are controlled, the difference in the levels of employment and population is explained by entrepreneurship. Once the national economic recessions begin, however, the difference between high and low entrepreneurship counties disappears. This reflects that the role of entrepreneurship can differ according to the attributes of disturbances. Based on the empirical results, this study demonstrates that entrepreneurship can be an important element of regional economic resilience. To be specific, its role is conspicuous in employment and population growth after natural disasters. Furthermore, this study contributes to previous studies by illustrating that the effects of entrepreneurship depend on measurement and disturbances. With regard to empirical finding, this study suggests several policy implications that can increase regional economic resilience.

This ground-breaking Handbook presents a state-of-the-art exploration of entropy, complexity and spatial dynamics from fundamental theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives. It considers how foundational theories can contribute to new advances, including novel modeling and empirical insights at different sectoral, spatial and temporal scales.

This Handbook provides a collection of high quality contributions on the state of the art in current debates around the concept of regional economic resilience. It provides critical contributions from leading authors in the field, and captures both key theoretical debates around the meaning of resilience, its conceptual framing and utility, as well as empirical interrogation of its key determinants in different international contexts.

In economic geography, there is a tendency to view regional economies as an inter-connected and endlessly evolving system. The way in which different sectors interact with each other in a region significantly influences the performance and future development of a local economy. This dissertation is comprised of three essays on U.S. regional economies, focusing on their resilience in the context of globalization as well as sector employment growth in recent decades. By investigating the impacts of entrepreneurship and industrial structure on the development and future pathways of a local economy, I seek to reveal details about the mechanisms of regional economic development and resilience from an evolutionary perspective. The first two essays are about regional resilience against trade shocks. Different from previous literature in this area, these two articles study economic resilience from a new perspective of evolutionary economic geography, which emphasizes the ability to reconfigure economic structure and develop new growth pathways. The first essay proposes several mechanisms through which entrepreneurs can help to mitigate adverse trade shocks. Empirical results confirm that the adverse marginal impacts of trade shocks on job losses are dampened in regions with higher self-employment rates. The second essay studies how a regional economy converts the adverse impacts of import competition into a stimulus for developing new growth pathways. It is found that regions experiencing greater import competition are more likely to attract new industry entrants, which in turn may offer new growth opportunities and counteract the direct losses from trade shocks. The third essay uses data on U.S. Commuting zones to investigate the heterogeneous impacts of industrial variety on the development of different sectors. The results suggest that industrial variety has a greater contribution to employment growth in two types of sectors: manufacturing industries that are technologically intensive, and geographically-agglomerated industries. This suggests the roles of industrial variety in contributing to growth are principally sector-based, and significantly depend on region-industry specific conditions.

Enterprise and entrepreneurship is of strong interest to policy-makers because new and small firms can be a key contributor to job and wealth creation. However this contribution varies spatially, with some areas in a country having new firm formation rates that are up to three or four times higher than others. The vast majority of these new firms begin in the geographical area in which the founder lives, works or was born emphasising that entrepreneurship is a local event. The book documents a diversity of research approaches to examining the regional determinants of entrepreneurship in countries as contrasting as India and Sweden. The Editors call is for scholars to better understand the long run factors that influence enterprise at the local and regional level. For policy makers the Editors challenge is for them to be much clearer about the targets for their policies. Is it new firms, new jobs, productivity and does it matter where these targets are delivered? This book was published as a special issue of Regional Studies.