Cities, Tasks and Skills

Suzanne Kok () and Bas ter Weel
Additional contact information
Suzanne Kok: CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

No 8053, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This research applies a task-based approach to measure and interpret changes in the employment structure of the 168 largest US cities in the period 1990-2009. As a result of technological change some tasks can be placed at distance, while others require proximity. We construct a measure of task connectivity to investigate which tasks are more likely to require proximity relative to others. Our results suggest that cities with higher shares of connected tasks experienced higher employment growth. This result is robust to a variety of other explanations including industry composition, routinisation, and the complementarity between skills and cities.

Keywords: cities; tasks; occupations; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J30 O30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-ger, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published - published in: Journal of Regional Science, 2014, 54 (5), 856-892

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8053.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: CITIES, TASKS, AND SKILLS (2014)
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:iza:izadps:dp8053

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().