We analyze mismatches between local labor markets and higher education enrollments in 22 educational fields across 137 mesoregions in Brazil between 2009 and 2016 using a two-stage regression model. Local labor markets have a significant effect on enrollment rates by field in higher education...

The labor markets of most industrialized countries are polarized. This means that employment has grown in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. However, there exists no measure that allows a...

Whether individuals choose occupations that teach general or specific skills can have important implications on how protected they are from changing conditions on the labor market. This paper looks at the impact of growing up in a region exposed to structural change caused by import competition...

In most industrialized countries, employment has grown predominately in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has stagnated or declined. This process of job polarization is well documented for a number of countries. We...

This paper examines job polarization at the level of local labor markets in Germany over a 30-year period. The major explanation of job polarization is skill biased technological change (SBTC): new technologies are complementary to high paying jobs but substitute workers in routine manual jobs...

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 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...

Matches between workers and jobs are better in thick labour markets than in thin ones. This paper measures match quality by the gap between worker skills and their job tasks in the Netherlands. The smaller the gap, the better the match between skills and tasks. The measured gaps are 14 percent...

In cities, complementarity between a low-skilled and a high-skilled workforce can promote each other to improve labor productivity. In this study, we used earlier census data and 1% population survey data to examine the distribution of the skilled workforce in cities in the People's Republic of...

This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...