The Industrial Curvature Index A Geometric Framework for Regional Recession Resilience and Adjustment Speed: Evidence from 3,115 U.S. Counties, 2001–2024

Gregory Villines

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I introduce the Industrial Curvature Index (ICI), a geometric measure of how distinctive a county’s industrial composition is from that of its geographic neighbors. ICI is constructed by representing each county-quarter as a point on the simplex of NAICS supersector employment shares, equipping the simplex with the Fisher–Rao information metric, and computing time-averaged Ollivier–Ricci curvature on the Census-defined county adjacency graph. High ICI corresponds to counties embedded in tightly coupled regional clusters; low ICI to counties whose industrial composition is structurally distinctive from their neighbors’. The principal empirical finding is that ICI is a strong and robust predictor of cross-county heterogeneity in recession-trough employment loss. Across 3,115 retained U.S. counties from 2001 through 2024, a one-standard-deviation increase in ICI corresponds to a 4.86 percentage-point deeper 2008–2009 employment trough (β = −4.86, HC3 p

Keywords: regional resilience; information geometry; Ollivier–Ricci curvature; Fisher–Rao metric; Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages; Local Area Unemployment Statistics; regional adjustment dynamics; employment recessions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 E32 J64 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05-01
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