PhD Dissertation: The evolving geography of jobs: How relatedness shapes labour dynamics

Jobs disappear, jobs are created, and jobs change, in a geographically uneven way. Labour dynamics are particular to each place. This doctoral thesis investigates the way jobs relate to each other – relatedness – and how it shapes the evolving geography of jobs.

First, using multi-country employment data, we find that bigger cities have a more than proportionally higher density of relatedness between jobs. Second, relatedness has promoted labour diversification in USA cities, pulling together jobs that are complementary, similar, and/or synergic to each other –“magnet effects”. Third, the impacts of automation spread through relatedness links between jobs: employment growth is higher for jobs that are complementary, but not similar, to local jobs with high-risk of automation – “diffusion effects”. Finally, we show in a study on the impact of EU business incentives in Portuguese firms that policy can stimulate the dense structure of relatedness in innovative sectors to increase job quality.

Overall, our findings help design policy instruments that neutralize the local diffusion of negative impacts from automation, while promoting the positive impacts.