Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-4734-6725

Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design

Department

Not Listed

Committee Chair

Heather Stephens

Committee Co-Chair

John Deskins

Committee Member

John Deskins

Committee Member

Levan Elbakidze

Committee Member

Brad Humphreys

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that employ applied econometric analysis to examine issues related to local labor markets. These analyses explore three distinct sources of structural change or policy interventions and evaluate their implications for regional labor markets. I examine the impact of occupational skill endowments on regional resilience to a recessionary shock, how exposure to increases in employer skill demand affects local labor markets, and whether grants extended by an existing federally chartered regional commission have a positive impact on distressed local labor markets within its service area.

The first chapter of this dissertation studies the impact that occupational skill endowments have on a local labor market’s resilience to negative economic shocks. Specifically, I examine whether a county’s pre-pandemic share of cognitive, motor, people, or digitally skilled workers was a determinant of employment resilience following the COVID-19 induced economic shock. Much of the literature on regional resilience to shocks emerged from the Great Recession and has primarily focused on the role that industrial diversity plays in explaining resilience to that shock. I contribute to the literature by 1) creating a novel measure of occupational skills at the county level, 2) providing the first evidence of how occupational skills impacted resilience to the COVID-19 shock, and 3) demonstrating that the impact of occupational skills is heterogeneous across the rural-urban continuum. I find that areas with higher endowments of cognitive skills were less vulnerable to employment losses at the onset of the pandemic, likely driven by patterns of remote work. However, these areas experienced weaker recoveries in the longer term. The opposite pattern is observed in regions with high endowments of people skills, which rely on face-to-face interactions that were significantly impacted at the beginning of the pandemic. These patterns were primarily driven by sparsely populated rural counties. I also find suggestive evidence that these patterns were influenced by migration patterns to rural areas, as rural areas with high endowments of people skills were associated with significant increases in net migration rates.

In my second chapter, I analyze how growth in employer skill demand following the Great Recession affected local labor markets after the recovery of the aggregate U.S. labor market. Using data on the near universe of online job postings from 2010 to 2015, I create occupation-level measures of changes in the demand for cognitive, software, people, organizational, and computer skills at the national level. These changes are then linked to commuting zone occupation employment to create measures of a commuting zone’s exposure to changes in the demand for these skills during the first half of the 2010s. Results from this chapter indicate that exposure to increased demand for software skills, which can be considered a proxy for exposure to technological change, was associated with lower labor force participation and declining employment-to-population ratios, particularly among young men. It is also linked to increased labor market polarization, suggesting that this demographic may struggle to find employment due to decreased opportunities to find work in the most exposed areas. Conversely, increasing demand for organizational skills was associated with higher labor market attachment but also led to increased unemployment. Changes in demand for cognitive and people skills exhibit mixed effects, while increases in demand for computer skills appear to have had a small, but positive, association with labor force attachment.

My third and final chapter assesses the impact of grants made by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) on distressed local labor markets within its service region in Appalachia. Recent legislation authorizing nearly $80 billion for place-based investments, along with the recent reauthorization and expansion of federally chartered regional commissions and authorities, has illustrated interest among U.S. policymakers in strategically targeting specific areas to stimulate economic development. Although the literature on place-based policies is mixed, there is evidence that the benefits of local job creation programs are most significant in the areas with the greatest economic distress. However, most place-based spending in the U.S. comes from state and local business tax incentives that generally do not target these areas, thus limiting research on existing customized business service and job training programs targeting distressed places. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by utilizing data on business and workforce grants given to counties and using matching methods to create a set of control counties. These are used to analyze the impact of grants administered and funded by the ARC on employment, wages, and establishment counts in distressed counties. Results from this study indicate that business and workforce grants distributed by the ARC have a modest but statistically significant impact on county annual average wages, with the effects being most pronounced in the region's most economically distressed areas. While there are no significant impacts on employment, there is some indication of crowding out of establishments following the receipt of a grant, possibly due to grants being targeted at better performing, already established firms.

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