Since the 1980s, employment opportunities in both the United States and the New York–northern New Jersey region have become increasingly polarized. While technological advances and globalization have created new jobs for workers at the high end of the skill spectrum and largely spared the...

While the U.S. manufacturing sector has contracted sharply since the early 1980s, employment in high-skill manufacturing occupations has risen by an impressive 37 percent. An investigation of the growth in high-skill manufacturing jobs reveals that virtually all of the nation's industries have...

We study one potential source of urban agglomeration economies: better job matching. Focusing on college graduates, we construct two direct measures of job matching based on how well an individual’s job corresponds to his or her college education. Consistent with matching-based theories of...

Upstate New York's weak population and labor force growth in recent years has raised concerns about a loss of educated workers. Indeed, the region has seen a net outflow of college-educated people. This issue of Upstate New York At-a-Glance finds that this net outflow reflects a low rate of...

We develop a measure of chronic joblessness among prime-age men and women in the United States - termed the detachment rate - that identifies those who have been out of the labor force for more than a year. We show that the detachment rate more than doubled for men since the early 1980s and rose...