Relevant indicators:

• Job and wage growth

The growth in jobs and earnings by wage level indicator uses our filled-in QCEW dataset described above, and seeks to track shifts in regional industrial job composition and wage growth over time by industry wage level. Using 1990 as the base year, we classified broad industries (at the two-digit NAICS level) into three wage categories: low-, medium-, and high-wage industries. An industry’s wage category was based on its average annual wage, and each of the three categories contained approximately one-third of all private two-digit NAICS industries in the region. We applied the 1990 industry wage-category classification across all the years in the dataset, so that the industries within each category remained the same over time. This way, we could track the broad trajectory of jobs and wages in low-, medium-, and high-wage industries.

This approach was adapted from a method used in a Brookings Institution report, Building From Strength: Creating Opportunity in Greater Baltimore's Next Economy. While we initially sought to conduct the analysis at a more detailed NAICS level, the large amount of missing data at the three- to six-digit NAICS levels for most Atlas geographies (which could not be resolved with the method that was applied to generate our filled-in two-digit QCEW dataset) prevented us from doing so.