In addition to examining the relationship between civic health and unemployment in the 50 states, these relationships have also been investigated in large metropolitan areas. Because we were not able to find reliable local statistics on some of the factors that we included in our state model (such as the size of the gas and oil industries), and because we did not have scholarly literature on the predictors of recent unemployment change in metropolitan areas, we chose economic factors that often prove significant in research on economic performance: residential stability, educational attainment, per capita wealth, racial demographics, and percentage of workers in professional jobs. The data limitations make our findings for the metropolitan areas more tentative than those for states. Nevertheless, the same basic pattern applies to metro areas: those with higher civic engagement in 2006 have weathered the recession considerably better, even when important economic factors are controlled. A model including the five civic engagement indicators measured in 2006 plus five economic control variables can explain 64.2% of the variation in metro areas’ unemployment change from 2006-10, with volunteering and voter registration emerging as the two most important factors. If civic health does affect unemployment at the state level, its effects are likely felt at the community level as well.