Background

This section provides an overview of the differences between the labor market delineations provided on this web site. For a more detailed analysis of these differences refer to Fowler et al. (in review). The tables below are drawn directly from that paper. The basic conclusion of that paper was that a number of labor market delineations were viable and that the labor market concept was generally robust when applied to U.S. data. The paper identifies three main areas of ‘fit’: Core, Connection, and Containment.

• Core refers to the degree to which labor markets contain a substantial economic concentration within them,
• Connection refers to the degree to which economic connections among counties in a labor market result in correlated movements of key economic indicators (in this case average wage),
• Containment refers to the degree to which residents of the labor market also work in the labor market.

While most of the delineations considered do relatively well on all three metrics, trade-offs do exist in terms of larger labor markets that contain almost all of their residents but may be too large to exhibit strong economic connection. Similarly, the desire to attain complete coverage of the U.S. drives some of the delineations to include labor markets without a significant economic core; a limitation for some applications that rely on labor market observations.

This table gives a complete list of the metrics used to describe the labor markets considered in the paper.

Descriptive Statistics

The following table is drawn from the paper by Fowler et al. (in review) and shows the descriptive measures calculated for each delineation as they apply to each of the delineations considered in the paper.

Fit Statistics

The following table summarizes fit statistics for each delineation. A web-based visualization of several of these fit statistics can be found here