U.S. economic activity is overwhelmingly concentrated at its ocean and Great Lakes coasts, reflecting a large contribution from coastal proximity to productivity and quality of life. Extensively controlling for correlated natural attributes and initial conditions decisively rejects that the...

By adopting the evolutionary approach to resilience, this paper discusses and empirically investigate the determinants of the ability of region to resist, absorb, and react to recessionary shocks. The recent 2008 Great Recession has extremely affected most of the advanced economies all over the...

Gibrat's law, the orthogonality of growth to initial levels, is considered a stylized fact of local population growth. But throughout U.S. history, local population growth has significantly deviated from orthogonality. In earlier periods smaller counties strongly converged whereas larger...