Employment Diversity on Tribal Nations in the Western U.S.: Quantifying Economic Resilience

This thesis measures the impact of employment sector diversity on per capita income for tribal nations in the western U.S. over two, five-year summary time periods. Invoking definitions of economic resilience from economic geography literature to construct an OLS model, employment diversity is selected as the most feasible means of incorporating hypothesized indicators of resilience at the reservation spatial scale. By calculating three measures of employment diversity, the Hachman Index, the Herfindahl Index, and Shannon’s Index, based on the North American Industry Classification System, this study measures the impact of employment diversity on per capita income both non-comparatively and with respect to the state the reservation primarily falls within. The model employed finds evidence that employment diversity metrics that measure non-comparative diversity (Shannon’s Index, Herfindahl Index) have a positive and significant relationship with income, with higher diversity indicating higher real income levels. Performance of the non-comparative diversity measures is the strongest when included alongside the state comparative Hachman Index, which holds a negative, and slightly less significant, relationship with income. From these two alternating relationships, it is suggested that tribal nations benefit from diversifying employment on reservations but may not benefit from modeling that diversification after state industry employment spreads