The Geography of Job Tasks

Enghin Atalay, Sebastian Sotelo and Daniel Tannenbaum

No 21-27, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: The returns to skills and the nature of work differ systematically across labor markets of different sizes. Prior research has pointed to worker interactions, technological innovation, and specialization as key sources of urban productivity gains, but has been limited by the available data in its ability to fully characterize work across geographies. We study the sources of geographic inequality and present new facts about the geography of work using online job ads. We show that the (i) intensity of interactive and analytic tasks, (ii) technological requirements, and (iii) task specialization all increase with city size. The gradient for tasks and technologies exists both across and within occupations. It is also steeper for jobs requiring a college degree and for workers employed in non-tradable industries. We document that our new measures help account for a substantial portion of the urban wage premium, both in aggregate and across occupation groups.

JEL-codes: J20 J24 R12 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 76
Date: 2021-08-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-isf, nep-lma, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... ers/2021/wp21-27.pdf (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Geography of Job Tasks (2024)
Working Paper: The Geography of Job Tasks (2022)
Working Paper: The Geography of Job Tasks (2022)
Working Paper: The Geography of Job Tasks (2021)
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:fedpwp:92952

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2021.27

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().