Labor Market Hotbeds
One way to determine whether a community is thriving is to look at its labor market. A surge in employment and earnings in a city, for example, can lead to improved financial well-being for residents, whose money can circle back to fuel continued community success through shopping, paying for living expenses and taxes.
The annual Best-Performing Cities report from the nonprofit Milken Institute examines the economic growth and performance of hundreds of large and small metro areas across the country, ranking them based on over a dozen metrics that are grouped into three categories: labor market performance, high-tech impact and access to economic opportunities.
To measure the labor market performance of large cities – defined as areas with populations exceeding 275,000 residents – the report uses three different measures of job growth and two different measures of wage growth over time.
These are the 12 big cities with the best labor markets – along with their rankings on individual metrics and overall ranking among large cities – based on the report’s findings.
