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In the past few years, nearly every analysis of the impacts of a catastrophe in the United States has highlighted the resilience of the economy (see, eg, Chernick, 2005; Boettke et al., 2007; Flynn, 2008). The term resilience is sometimes used to explain why regional or national economies do not decline as much as might be expected or recover more quickly than predicted. Otherwise, the term is either poorly defined or defined so broadly as to be meaningless. For example, only one of the authors of Resilient City: The Economic Impact of 9/11 (Chernick, 2005) defines resilience, nor is the term even included in the index of the collection of papers. This and several other recent studies in related fields on a broad range of disasters (see, eg, Vale and Campanella, 2005) use resilience in the vernacular and appear to be unaware of three decades of formal refinement of the term in several different disciplines. As such, economic resilience is in danger of becoming a meaningless buzzword. The purpose of this report is to explain how economic resilience has evolved into a meaningful, quantifiable, measurable, and actionable concept. The report summarizes the literature on economic resilience and how it can be expanded by work in related fields and on related concepts. It then focuses on a specific set of definitions of various dimensions of the concept, stemming from a combination of the author’s own work and a general consensus of researchers in the field. This is followed by examples of resilience actions by various decisionmakers (business, households, government) and how they are related to aspects of the economic production function. A …