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.

In the United States, the economic recession and the ongoing economic restructuring have led researchers and policy makers to revisit their assumptions about the drivers of economic growth. My research seeks to understand the drivers of economic growth in two regions of the United States that have suffered the most during the recent period – Appalachia and the Great Lakes Region.

My dissertation consists of three essays on U.S. regional economics. The aim of the research is to understand the variations in economic outcomes across regions and how those persistent differences can be reduced. In particular, I study the geographic patterns and the determinants of internal migration, and examine the development of social capital. In the first chapter, I document U.S. internal migration between the period from 1960-2000 using a newly collected data set. I find that the recent decline in migration is driven by lower migration across states, while within state migration has increased during the observed periods. To explain this, I use a gravity framework and estimate the effect of state borders on migration flows. I find that the border effect is strongly significant, and within state migration is 3.2 times higher than across state migration. Furthermore, the border effect has increased from 2.7 in 1960 to 3.6 in 2000. I show that the differences in social and economic characteristics between areas contribute to a larger state border effect, and the increase of the border effect over time is associated with the rising differences in house prices as states implement more restrictive land use regulations. I find that this is due to lower in-migration in states that are highly regulated in land uses. For high income destinations, the rise in regulations can explain all of the increase in the border effect. In the second chapter, I examine the effect of political differences on migration decisions and provide empirical evidences of partisan geographic sorting among American migrants. Using presidential election returns and the same migration data for the period from 1960-2000, I show that political differences between areas decrease migration, as Americans prefer to live in areas with similar ideology and political views. I find that there are a lower number of migrants between places that supported different political parties, and migration flows decrease as differences in vote shares increase. In addition, I do not find evidence that Americans are increasingly sorting by partisanship over time, which is previously known in the literature as the "big sort" hypothesis. The last chapter studies the level of social trust across regions in the United States, and how it arises using natural disasters as exogenous shocks between 1973 and 2010. Every year, the United States is hit by natural disasters that take away lives and cause property damage. In the event of a natural disaster, the victims are more likely to have increased interaction with others. If the experience of increased social interaction is positive, this can positively affect the level of social trust. To test this, I combine two U.S. survey data sets with the natural disaster data, and find that the individuals who have recently experienced natural disasters are more likely to have higher level of trust. One standard deviation increase in natural disasters is associated with an increase of 0.014 standard deviations in trust. I also provide evidence of positive social experiences by showing that natural disasters are associated with an increase in cooperation with neighbors.

Compilation of essays on government policy and regional planning concerning developing areas in the USA - covers such topics as industrial development, industrial policy for both urban areas and rural areas surplus labour supply areas, urbanization, the employment opportunity promotion effects of new plants location (location of industry), capital flows, problems of rural poverty in Southern states, etc., and includes large-scale models for forecasting regional economic activity and descriptions of econometrics research methods.

Coping with Adversity addresses the question of why some metropolitan-area regional economies are resilient in the face of economic shocks and chronic distress while others are not. It is particularly concerned with what public policies make a difference in whether a region is resilient. The authors employ a wide range of techniques to examine the experience of all metropolitan area economies from 1978–2014. They then look closely at six American metropolitan areas to determine what strategies were employed, which of these contributed to regional economic resilience, and which did not. Charlotte, North Carolina, Seattle, Washington, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, are cases of economic resilience, while Cleveland, Ohio, Hartford, Connecticut, and Detroit, Michigan, are cases of economic nonresilience. The six case studies include hard data on employment, production, and demographics, as well as material on public policies and actions. The authors conclude that there is little that can done in the short term to counter economic shocks; most regions simply rebound naturally after a relatively short period of time. However, they do find that many regions have successfully emerged from periods of prolonged economic distress and that there are policies that can be applied to help them do so. Coping with Adversity will be important reading for all those concerned with local and regional economic development, including public officials, urban planners, and economic developers.

The term “resilience” originated in environmental studies and describes one’s biological capacity to adapt and thrive under adverse environmental conditions. Regional economic resilience is defined as the capacity of a territory’s economy to resist and/or recover quickly from external shocks, often even improving on its prior situation (before the shock). The contributions in this book analyse different channels related to processes of mitigation (resistance–recovery) and adaptive resilience (reorientation–renewal), in a wide variety of geographical settings and scales. While the different chapters include relevant methodological advances in this literature, they also obtain relevant results from a policy perspective. Moreover, the wide spectrum of topics and analyses among the contributions in this book extend the current framework, to analyse regional economic resilience, from the intersection of several disciplines involving geographers, economists and demographers, as well as environmental scientists.