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arXiv · 2606.09918

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

Anthony Howell·Maryann Feldman·Lauren Lanahan·Nikhil Kalathil·Evan Johnson
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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.

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Anthony Howell, Maryann Feldman, Lauren Lanahan, Nikhil Kalathil, Evan Johnson. 2026-06-06. An economic geography dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09918

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