Trust as a Structural Resilience Asset Under Exogenous Stress

This project tests whether trust functions as a structural resilience asset rather than a psychological or cultural variable. The study examines whether organizations with higher pre-shock trust-equilibrium proxies exhibit measurably greater resilience during externally imposed systemic crises (e.g., 2008, 2020, 2022). Trust is operationalized using observable, third-party indicators (employee stability, customer stability, regulatory compliance history), avoiding surveys, interviews, or author-coded measures. The study is pre-registered prior to data access, with fixed hypotheses, proxy definitions, model specifications, and falsification criteria. The goal is to evaluate the predictive validity of a trust-as-equilibrium framework under stress using reproducible, contamination-minimized methods.