As the Walls of Academia are Tumbling Down

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58008/1/2717844392.pd

Personality of place: Regional psychosocial characteristics of economic activity

Increasingly, social scientists are recognizing the limitations of traditional measures (e.g., geographic, demographic, economic) when trying to explain differing regional prosperity outcomes. This research seeks to understand how regions’ differing personalities can help describe economic variance. We test this by employing least squares linear regression on an exploratory battery of 16 psychosocial variables (the “Big 5” personality profiles, plus other General Social Survey items) and four dependent variables of economic output: per capita income, employment rates, income mobility, and rates of entrepreneurship. All items, aggregated at the county level across the US, exhibited a unique constellation of relationships, emphasizing the great need for more work on the economic impact of what we coin the personality of place

Religiosity and Regional Resilience to Recession

Literature shows that religiosity can provide individual resilience to life shocks as well as regional resilience to disasters caused by natural hazards. Related work has examined the complicated links between religion and economic growth. Yet few, if any, studies examine the role of regional levels of religiosity on a region's resilience to recession—or how quickly the employment rate returns to pre-recession levels (a common measure of resilience in the economics literature). As the recovery period of the Great Recession cools and economists warn of future economic downturns, all known variables that may be linked with regional resilience are worthy of exploration. Using survey results from the Gosling-Potter Internet Project and General Social Surveys, we applied logarithmic functions to pre- and post-Great Recession employment data for 2,836 U.S. counties. We found a modest and statistically significant association between religious belief and regional resilience to recession. Religiosity was the strongest of sixteen psychosocial variables that we examined in association with the speed of job recovery; despite having negative links with other economic variables. This has particular salience for more rural economies; policy implications are discussed