A U.S. county panel of skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity, across employer entity type

A publicly available county-year panel of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity, derived from 433.6 million Lightcast (formerly Burning Glass) job postings spanning 2010-2024. The panel covers 3,194 counties across 15 years (47,891 county-year observations) and reports 201 variables organized into eleven groups: a 37-variable core set describing the volume, employer-entity composition, work mode and internships, skill content, specialization, complexity, relatedness, and dynamics of local labor demand, plus 164 additional variables in the entity-decomposed extension covering entity-type specialization breadth, employer-pair skill-similarity, and per-employer-type dynamics for sectoral and spillover research. For the conceptual framework, main measure definitions, technical background, and applications in the literature, see the accompanying working paper: Howell, A., Feldman, M., Lanahan, L., Kalathil, N., & Johnson, E. (2026). An economic geography dataset of U.S. skill specialization, relatedness, and complexity. Working paper, SSRN. Interactive dashboard 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. Explore key variables of the panel without writing code: https://skills-econ-geog.netlify.app/