The concept of resilience has been receiving both theoretical and empirical attention in recent years, from different disciplinary fields, including spatial economics where resilience is becoming a 'popular' term. In particular, the concept of spatial economic resilience seems to assume slightly different interpretations. Starting from the basic definitions of resilience, which stem from ecology, this paper aims to highlight the similarities and the differences in the various analyses of resilience, in order to offer some insights into its use in the spatial economics literature.

The 2008 Great Recession prompted interest in the concept of regional resilience. This paper discusses and empirically investigates the relationship between industrial relatedness and economic resilience across European Union regions over the 2008–2012 crisis period. The analysis focuses on two types of industrial relatedness: technological and vertical (i.e., market‐based). The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of 209 NUTS 2 regions in 16 countries. Our results highlight a positive effect of technological relatedness on the probability of resilience in the very short run (i.e., the 2008–2009 period), while the negative effect of vertical relatedness seems to persist for longer.

ABSTRACT. In the literature, the distribution of city size is a controversial issue with two common contenders: the Pareto and the log-normal. While the first is most accredited when the distribution is truncated above a certain threshold, the latter is usually considered a better representation for the untruncated distribution of all cities. In this paper, we reassess the empirical evidence on the best-fitting distribution in relation to the truncation point issue. Specifically, we provide a comparison among four recently proposed approaches and alternative definitions of U.S. cities. Our results highlight the importance to look at issue of the best-fitting distribution together with the truncation issue and provide guidance with respect to the existing tests of the truncation point.