This research examines specific impacts of the Great Recession on local and regional economies across the United States. This recession was the worst economic downturn in the last sixty years, and the first of its kind since modern datasets are available to explore more localized effects. The following essays explore patterns in labor markets that affect wages, regional employment, and firm growth.

Leading researchers on economic resilience from economic geography, economic history and organizational studies discuss recent approaches to better understand the impact of structures, processes, agency, governance and multilevel settings on economic resilience.

The mission of the Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects series is to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, and experiments in addressing the key social and economic problems facing today's cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. Volume four of the series introduces and examines thoroughly the concept of regional resilience, explaining how resilience can be promoted—or impeded—by regional characteristics and public policies. The authors illuminate how the walls that now segment metropolitan regions across political jurisdictions and across institutions—and the gaps that separate federal laws from regional realities—have to be bridged in order for regions to cultivate resilience. Contributors: Patricia Atkins, George Washington University; Pamela Blumenthal, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Sarah Ficenec, George Washington University; Alec Friedhoff, Brookings Institution; Kathryn Foster, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Juliet Gainsborough, Bentley University; Edward Hill, Cleveland State University; Kate Lowe, Cornell University; John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Mai Nguyen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Rolf Pendall, Urban Institute; Nancy Pindus, Urban Institute; Sarah Reckhow, Michigan State University; Travis St. Clair, George Washington University; Todd Swanstrom, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Margaret Weir, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Wial, Brookings Institution; Harold Wolman, George Washington University

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.

This path-breaking book presents a crucial contribution to the current academic discussion on regional competitiveness and the policy debate on smart specialization, place-based development and cohesion policy in the European Union. As such it will prove