This paper examines differences in the skill content of work throughout the United States, ranging from densely populated city centers to isolated and sparsely populated rural areas. To do so, we classify detailed geographic areas into categories along the entire urban-rural hierarchy. An...

This paper examines the micro-foundations of occupational agglomeration in U.S. metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on labor market pooling. Controlling for a wide range of occupational attributes, including proxies for the use of specialized machinery and for the importance of knowledge...

This paper examines the micro-foundations of occupational agglomeration in U.S. metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on labor market pooling. Controlling for a wide range of occupational attributes, including proxies for the use of specialized machinery and for the importance of knowledge...

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...

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...

Many employers adopt practices that insulate their workforces from the outside labor market. One defining characteristic of such an "internal labor market" is a company wage policy that diverges from that of the external market. These divergences may occur for an entire employer on average, or...