Workforce skills across the urban-rural hierarchy

Jaison Abel, Todd Gabe and Kevin Stolarick

No 552, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: 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 occupation-based cluster analysis is then used to measure the types of skills available in the regional workforce, which allows for a broader measure of human capital than is captured by conventional measures. We find that the occupation clusters most prevalent in urban areas?scientists, engineers, and executives?are characterized by high levels of social and resource-management skills, as well as the ability to generate ideas and solve complex problems. By contrast, the occupation clusters that are most prevalent in rural areas?machinists, makers, and laborers?are among the lowest in terms of required skills. These differences in the skill content of work shed light on the pattern of earnings observed across the urban-rural hierarchy.

Keywords: earnings; urban-rural; human capital; occupations; skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 O18 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2012-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: For a published version of this report, see Jaison R. Abel, Todd M. Gabe, and Kevin Stolarick, "Skills across the Urban-Rural Hierarchy," Growth and Change 45, no. 4 (December 2014): 499-517.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr552.pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr552.html (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fednsr:552

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().