Occupational Coherence and Local Labor Market Performance: Evidence from France

Why do labor markets in some regions recover faster from an adverse economic shock than others? We conjecture that regions with occupations offering greater redeployment opportunities to other occupations are less at risk of long-term unemployment. We examine this by creating a network of inter-occupation relatedness from worker mobility data that provides occupational transitions for a representative sample of French workers. Superimposing local occupational composition on to this "occupation space" yields a measure of occupational coherence for 304 commuting zones in France. We find that regions with stronger occupational coherence are more sensitive to a shock but recover faster.