ABSTRACT. This research applies a task-based approach to measure and interpret changes in the employment structure of the 168 largest U.S. 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, routinization, and the complementarity between skills and cities.

The authors analyse change in employment levels and in the task content of occupations, both within occupations (i.e. at the intensive margin) and between occupations (i.e. at the extensive margin) in the United Kingdom over the period 1997–2006 using data from the national Skills Survey, which has comparable within‐occupation task data for three waves: 1997, 2001 and 2006. They find that within‐occupation task content changed significantly, and that the magnitude of change was similar to that found at the extensive margin. Their econometric results suggest that these intensive‐margin shifts can be explained by technological improvements but not by offshoring.

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 of a standard deviation smaller in cities than in the Dutch countryside. The location of work explains the observed higher quality of matches, while the location of residence does not. Robustness analyses show that these results are not explained by more efficient learning in cities or the spatial distribution of industrial and service occupations. Higher matching quality is associated with higher wages and explains part of the urban wage premia. JEL Codes: J24; J23; R12; R23