Firm dynamics and regional resilience: an empirical evolutionary perspective

This article breaks down the distributional analysis of firm growth rates to the domain of regions. Extreme growth events, i.e., turbulence at the level of firms, are conceptualized as an indicator of competitive regional environments which enable processes like structural adaptation or technological re-orientation. This provides a micro-funded empirical framework to operationalize the evolutionary dimension of regional resilience. Therefore, the flexible Asymmetric Exponential Power density is fitted to firm data for each German region during the years of economic downturn (2008–2010). Results show that firm-level turbulence is more pronounced in regions with higher aggregate growth performance, with a highly qualified workforce and with more unrelated variety in the industrial portfolio.