The Spatial Distribution of Skills and Local Labor Market Resilience

This paper examines the impact that occupational skill endowments had on employment resilience to the COVID-19 shock. U.S. rural counties with more employment in industries requiring high cognitive skills were less vulnerable to the COVID shock, while those with higher endowments of employment requiring people skills had stronger recoveries. Importantly, since these results were primarily driven by rural counties, we document heterogeneous impacts of skill endowments on resilience across the rural-urban continuum. Descriptive analysis also suggests that migration to high people skill intensive counties may have contributed to these stronger recoveries.