Supported by the National Science Foundation, Adam Rose is contributing to the project “Advanced Data and Methods to Improve Minority and Women Owned Small and Mid-sized Enterprise Hazard Resilience.” The project is led by Create Fellow Noah Dormady at Ohio State University.
This project brings together a binational (US-Japan) team of experts in hazard resilience science and economics to gather and analyze novel data to improve understanding of how small and mid-sized enterprises (MSEs) rebound and recover from catastrophic events by improving their resilience capacity. This team includes scholars from leading hazard research centers in Japan and multiple leading US hazards, emergency management, infrastructure and national security centers.
This binational team focuses on the antecedents of SME resilience and recovery, with an explicit focus on at-risk minority- and women-owned and operated firms. It is working to:
a) develop innovative and pathbreaking theories that map resilience to microeconomic theory,
b) map those theoretical advancements to an observational data collection effort through cutting-edge survey research techniques,
c) utilize advanced statistical and econometric analysis to quantify resilience and recovery, and
d) use survey and statistical controls to quantify resilience metrics, and explicit resilience actions, or tactics, that these firms can implement to identify the most impactful set of strategies that minority- and women-owned and operated firms can use to improve disaster recovery.
This team includes a key external collaborator that nationally oversees the certification of a business as woman-owned, and connect the survey research to a robust sample of disaster-affected women-owned businesses. The research integrates diverse communities and diverse resilience activities and outcomes voiced by those communities.
The research provides theoretical bases for:
the analysis of efficient recovery from disasters in terms of dynamic economic resilience,
the formulation of theory-driven, testable hypotheses relating to recovery, and
the mapping of the microeconomic theory to a binational observational data collection effort through cutting-edge survey research techniques.
This is improving hazard resilience science by extending microeconomic production and investment theory to dynamic economic resilience. It will connect those theoretical advances to novel multi-area data collection efforts. Advanced data analysis techniques will then be applied, using econometric, and sequential decision-making Markov Decision Process (MDP) models.
The project’s explicit focus on underrepresented communities, including minority and women-owned SMEs will test extant theory regarding how social vulnerability intersects with economic outcomes. The empirical efforts will test key theories regarding how resilience propagates through time, over the duration of a recovery path. These include the extent to which SME recovery paths are less effective in reducing business interruption losses than those of best-practice firms, the relative advantages of accelerating recovery versus merely reducing its duration, and evaluating whether or not there exist significant equity/efficiency trade-offs in the application resilience investments.
This research will help reduce hazard vulnerability and improve the resilience capabilities of Small and Mid-Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The project’s focus on underrepresented groups, including minority- and women-owned SMEs, will help to address hazard resilience for some of the most at-risk businesses and the communities which rely upon them.
The project’s anticipated applications will improve resilience processes and capacity by enhancing the optimal timing of resilience investments including repair and reconstruction, including protecting against future disasters. These applications will help to identify best practices and identify obstacles to recovery. It will also help federal, state and local agencies improve policy design. The application to SMEs owned and operated by underrepresented groups will also improve equity and social justice with regard to the disproportionate consequences of natural disasters, insurance and the disbursement of government assistance.
Ultimately, efficient recovery will reduce the need for government assistance and improve its utilization and will help reduce insurance costs. Finally, this project primarily advances several Sendai Framework areas.