The measurement of resilience

Geir Asheim, Walter Bossert, Conchita D'Ambrosio and Claus Vögele

Journal of Economic Theory, 2020, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: Resilience has become an important topic in many social sciences. Numerous individual choices and economic and demographic outcomes are likely to be influenced by people's resilience. School performance, work absenteeism and burnout, longevity, the quality of sleep and health-risk behaviors such as substance abuse are some examples. Similarly, it is of high policy relevance to understand the determinants of both individual resilience (such as educational, marital and occupational status) and ecological resilience (such as climate change). Empirical work designed to uncover such relationships suffers from the absence of a resilience measure applicable in the context of large data sets. We fill this gap by proposing a specific measure that is characterized by a set of natural properties. After an introduction to the notion of resilience and its attributes, we argue why these conditions have intuitive appeal. Finally, we provide illustrating examples and derive our main characterization result.

Keywords: Resilience; German socio-economic panel; Index numbers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Working Paper: The measurement of resilience (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:189:y:2020:i:c:s0022053120300971

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2020.105104

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