This paper develops a Business Resilience Index (BRI) that measures county-level resilience to natural disasters at a county quarter frequency for the United States over 2014-2024. The index integrates high-frequency labor-market outcomes from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages with flood insurance policy information from FEMA, disaster damages from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and social and health determinants from County Health Rankings. Starting from a broad candidate set, we apply an interpretable feature-screening pipeline to retain 79 variables and then use principal component analysis to extract four orthogonal structural dimensions of resilience: Market Scale, Resilience Capacity, Safety and Risk Profile, and Workforce Dynamics. We construct a domain-weighted Strategic Index and benchmark it against data-driven and equal-weight alternatives, showing that county rankings are highly stable across weighting schemes. To evaluate whether the BRI aligns with recovery behavior under acute shocks, we implement a matched difference-in-differences event study around two major flood episodes, Texas 2015Q2 and North Carolina 2018Q3. Conditional on exposure intensity and matched comparability, higher pre-event BRI counties exhibit earlier stabilization and a stronger post-event employment path relative to lower BRI counties, with differences in magnitude and timing across cases. Overall, the BRI provides an interpretable, high-frequency baseline for identifying capacity constraints that may slow recovery and for supporting preparedness targeting and post-disaster monitoring.

This study examines whether context-validated acute distress disclosures in annual Form 10-K filings improve bankruptcy-risk ranking beyond accounting variables. The analysis links U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing data, Item 7 Management’s Discussion and Analysis text, and bankruptcy events from the Florida–UCLA–LoPucki Bankruptcy Research Database for fiscal years 2010–2021. The primary sample contains 21,239 nonfinancial firm-year observations and 159 one-year bankruptcy events. The paper develops a Validated Distress Disclosure (VDD) Dictionary that flags going-concern uncertainty, covenant noncompliance, and lender forbearance or waiver after sentence-level context filtering. In the 2019–2021 holdout test, adding VDD indicators to a six-variable Ohlson-related accounting baseline increases the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) from 0.8682 to 0.8827 ($\Delta =0.0146$; 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.0040, 0.0275]) and precision–recall AUC (PR-AUC) from 0.0924 to 0.2060 ($\Delta =0.1136$; 95% CI [0.0458, 0.2132]). Benchmark and decomposition tests indicate that the main signal is concentrated in going-concern disclosures and that VDD is best interpreted as an auditable ranking supplement to accounting variables and broader text models, not as a calibrated probability-of-default model.

This paper develops a Business Resilience Index (BRI) that measures county-level resilience to natural disasters at a county-quarter frequency for the United States over 2014–2024. The index integrates high-frequency labor market outcomes from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages with flood insurance policy information from FEMA, disaster damages from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and social and health determinants from County Health Rankings. Starting from a broad candidate set, we apply an interpretable feature-screening pipeline to retain 79 variables and then use principal component analysis to extract four orthogonal structural dimensions of resilience: market scale, socioeconomic resilience, urban density risk, and industrial economy profile. We construct a domain-weighted strategic index and benchmark it against data-driven and equal-weight alternatives, showing that county rankings are highly stable across weighting schemes. To evaluate whether the BRI aligns with recovery behavior under acute shocks, we implement a matched difference-in-differences event study around two major flood episodes—Texas in 2015Q2 and North Carolina in 2018Q3. Conditional on exposure intensity and matched comparability, higher pre-event BRI counties exhibit earlier stabilization and a stronger post-event employment path relative to lower BRI counties, with differences in magnitude and timing across cases. Overall, the BRI provides an interpretable, high-frequency baseline for identifying capacity constraints that may slow recovery and for supporting preparedness targeting and post-disaster monitoring.