An economic geography dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity

2026-06-06

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by constructing the first fine-grained, long-term dataset linking skill demand and economic geography at the U.S. county level. Drawing on 433.6 million job postings from 2010 to 2024, the project compiles a 15-year panel covering all 3,194 counties and introduces an innovative framework of county-level indicators—skill specialization, diversity, relatedness, and complexity. It further disaggregates skill alignment, overlap, and directional gaps by employer type. Integrating large-scale text mining, economic complexity methods, and spatial panel analysis, the work delivers a public dataset with 201 variables and an interactive visualization platform, enabling spatiotemporal analysis, cross-county comparison, and profiling of local skill structures to support both academic inquiry and evidence-based policymaking.

Abstract

We release a new dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity, derived from 433.6 million job postings between 2010 and 2024. The panel covers 3,194 counties across 15 years and reports 201 variables that describe the volume of job postings (e.g., labor demand), the modality and nature of work (e.g., remote share, internship share), and the structure of employer skill demand by category (e.g., specialized, software, and common). We develop a suite of economic geography variables: skill-based measures of county specialization, relatedness, diversity, complexity, and dynamics. These measures are further decomposed by employer entity type (corporate, university, government, and federal lab), along with entity-pair measures of alignment, overlap, and directional skill gaps. An accompanying interactive dashboard supports both academic research and applied use, with features including spatiotemporal visualization, county rankings and trends, pairwise county comparisons, and individual county profiles.

Problem

• skill specialization
• economic geography
• labor demand
• job postings
• county-level data

Innovation

• skill specialization
• economic geography
• job posting analytics
• skill relatedness
• interactive dashboard