About

Cities are the innovation centers of the US economy, but disruptions from technology or global events can displace workers. Therefore, urban policy must promote the jobs and skills that increase worker pay, stabilize employment, and make their workers adaptable to the future of work. This website explores a data-driven framework for achieving such predictive capability based on employment distributions in cities and the skill requirements of occupations according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The key innovation in this work is an ecologically-inspired job network constructed from the similarity of occupations’ skill requirements. Despite regional and historical differences, the economic resilience of cities is universally and uniquely determined by the connectivity between jobs within a city’s job network. For example, our analysis reveals that workers of occupations with high degree within a city’s job network enjoy higher wages than their peers elsewhere. In labor market theory, skills play an essential role in the process that matches job seekers to employment opportunities. For example, job seekers must possess the skills required by an employment opportunity in order to qualify. Thus, gaps between the skills of job seekers and the skills sought by employers can create labor market frictions and limit career mobility. This study uses urban employment distributions from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program in combination with occupational skill requirements from the O*NET database produced by the US Department of Labor. We create a network of US job titles (i.e. ac- cording to the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) system used by the US Department of Labor) based on the pairwise similarity of required skills. Combined with employment distributions in cities, we can highlight which parts of the national job network are supported in each city.

Mapping the economic resilience of urban labor markets

This framework enables us to consider a city’s labor market as an ecology of labor. Ecological studies have shown that the density of network of mutualistic (i.e., mutually beneficial) inter-species relationships determines the ecological resilience of an ecosystem. Thus, we employ an analogous measure for the den- sity of connections within each city’s job network to assess the city’s economic resilience. The analogy is that connections between occupations in a city’s job network share similar skill requirements and, thus, may indicate that worker can transition between those occupations without re-skilling. This in turn creates a positive spillover in the form of career mobility for workers within the labor market indicating which workers may most easily find new employment when a labor disruption occurs.

Exploring occupational embeddedness in urban labor markets

In addition to assessing systemic economic resilience, these job networks suggest that workers’ skills determine how central, or peripheral, they are to the rest of the city’s economy. A worker whose skills are useful in other parts of their local labor market will have more connections on the job network, thus indicating their increased relevance and value to the economy. We test this idea by measuring the weighted degree of each occupation in the job network of each city and comparing this occupational embeddedness to the average wages of workers with that job title in each city. Confirming our hypothesis, we find evidence for an embeddedness wage premium. Specifically, we find that, for almost all occupations in the US, workers of an occupation in a city where that occupation is more embedded will earn higher wages than their peers in other cities with the same job title.