Research Reports

This report includes two studies. The first documented unemployment trends and analyzed unemployment rates in Pennsylvania’s rural counties over a 30-year period. It also measured rates of underemployment for Pennsylvania and neighboring and nearby states with data from 1996 to 2006, and used more recent data from 2005-2006 to understand selected dimensions of underemployment, such as the age and education levels of the underemployed, in rural Pennsylvania. The second study focused on the forces causing unemployment, underemployment, or withdrawals from the labor market in rural Pennsylvania. The research assessed how labor markets in each rural Pennsylvania county were performing relative to each other, to urban Pennsylvania counties, and to carefully defined peer groups of similar counties nationwide. With this approach, the researchers could get a better sense of the strength, or weakness, of a county’s labor market along with a realistic forecast of what might be achievable.