Leading Indicators

New Residents in Philadelphia – Part 3: Occupations

This Leading Indicator is the third part in our series on understanding changes in Philadelphia’s labor market since the COVID-19 pandemic by monitoring changes to the city’s new resident population. In this issue, we continue our demographic analysis by looking at the top occupations among Philadelphia’s new residents and how many of them work inside the city as their primary place of employment.

 

What You Need to Know

  • The COVID-19 pandemic does not seem to have altered the top occupational preferences of Philadelphia’s new residents. The city’s largest industry sectors by employment—like Education Services and Healthcare and Social Services—remain large draws for new resident-workers.

  • Postsecondary Teachers and Physicians continuously ranked in the top five occupations among new residents every year since 2018.

  • Software Developers and Taxi Drivers were unique additions to the top five occupations of new residents in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

  • Since 2018, there has been an overall increase in the proportion of both new residents as well as long-time residents who both live and work within Philadelphia.

  • According to the IPUMS survey estimates, almost 86% of new residents were living and working in Philadelphia in 2021. This estimate increased from approximately 68% in 2020 and may be capturing some remote workers.

  • The average proportion of new residents who have lived and worked in Philadelphia has hovered around 74% from 2005 to 2021.

 

What are the Top Occupations among Philadelphia’s New Residents

We begin our analysis by looking at the primary occupations among new residents from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA household survey. Generally, the primary occupation refers to the job from which an individual obtains the majority of their earned income [1]. We analyzed the occupations of incoming residents since 2018 to account for occupational changes two years before and since the pandemic. All estimates for occupation types are derived from Philadelphia residents who moved into the city one year prior to the survey; for example, a new resident who was surveyed in 2020 moved to Philadelphia in 2019. Those residing in Philadelphia more than one year prior to the survey, however, were not included in our analysis.

 

Figure 1 shows the top primary occupations of Philadelphia’s new residents from 2018 to 2021. These top five occupations (out of roughly 102 occupational categories) showed the highest proportion of new resident workers and offer an interesting proxy metric of the types of occupations that may be attracting new workers to the city. 

 

FIGURE 1 

SOURCE: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA

 

Our analysis shows that the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic does not seem to have created a seismic change to new residents’ preferred occupations; some of the city’s largest industry sectors by employment—like Education Services and Healthcare and Social Services—remain large draws for new resident-workers. This is especially true for Postsecondary Teachers and Physicians who ranked in the top five new resident occupations in every year of our analysis. There were some unique additions to the most prevalent jobs among new residents since the pandemic: Software Developers and Taxi Drivers. These trends might be explained by the large shifts to remote work in 2020 which may have coincided with a need for more tech-related occupations, like software developers, and decreased travel via public transit, which might explain the growth in Taxi Drivers [2], [3]. These trends in new resident occupations provide an approximate estimate of the sectors in Philadelphia that attract labor from outside the city. As the region works to grow new industries, like life sciences and biotech, we should not ignore the fact that employment opportunities within some of our legacy sectors continue to draw many new working residents to Philadelphia.

 

Are New Residents Living and Working in Philadelphia?

In addition to the top occupations that attract new residents to Philadelphia, we also attempt to identify how many new residents are working within the city rather than commuting to a job outside city limits. By tracking counties of employment, Figure 2 compares the proportion of new residents living and working in Philadelphia with the average proportion of all residents who both lived and worked in the city from 2018 to 2021. Our analysis shows that there has been an overall increase in the proportion of residents who both live and work within Philadelphia across new residents as well as the city’s overall population. While there was a dip in this trend in 2020, in 2021 86% of new residents worked in the city – nearly 20% higher than in 2018.

 

FIGURE 2 

SOURCE: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA

 

To make sure that the post-pandemic estimates were not simply driven by a shift to remote work, we further investigated the historical proportions of new residents who live and work inside Philadelphia since 2005. Since the IPUMS household survey simply asks what the location of the resident’s primary place of work is, respondents might have answered with their home addresses as the primary place of work even if their employers are located outside the city [4]. In order to account for a potential upward bias in these estimates, in Figure 3 we looked at the historical proportions of new residents living and working in Philadelphia since 2005. The historical trend shows that the average proportion of new residents who live and work in Philadelphia has hovered around 74% from 2005 to 2021. This implies that the uptick in the proportion of new residents working within the city might be slightly inflated in the post-pandemic era: new residents might be working from home even if their employers are located outside the city. However, since recent estimates are only about six percentage points higher than the 17-year average for Philadelphia, we are inclined to believe it lends credibility to the IPUMS survey.

 

Overall, these trends seem to indicate that new residents may be looking to both live and work in the same area and suggest that the economic impact of remote work on Philadelphia’s labor force may not have been as dramatic as previously anticipated [5]. 

 

FIGURE 3 

SOURCE: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA

 

Looking Ahead

New residents in Philadelphia work in a diverse range of jobs both inside and outside the city but the Education Services and Healthcare and Social Assistance sector jobs are especially prevalent among new residents. Furthermore, evidence suggests that new residents are moving to Philadelphia not just for the low cost-of-living but may also be attracted to jobs offered by local employers. As we continue to work through these trends, we will work to explore the nature of remote work among new and long-term Philadelphia residents in future briefs.

 

Works Cited and Notes

[1] IPUMS USA. https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/OCC#description_section

 

[2] “5 charts showing the jobs of a post-pandemic future – and the skills you need to get them,” World Economic Forum, Oct. 22, 2020. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/x-charts-showing-the-jobs-of-a-p… (accessed Mar. 14, 2023).

 

[3] L. Liu, H. J. Miller, and J. Scheff, “The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on public transit demand in the United States,” PLOS ONE, vol. 15, no. 11, p. e0242476, Nov. 2020, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242476.

 

[4] We looked into the IPUMS usage of the question, conducted previous literature research, and calculated similar proportional estimates from surrounding counties of Philadelphia to better understand if 2020 and 2021 estimates may be inflated by remote work. Although our scan of the research remains inconclusive, we believe that the small uptick in proportion of new residents working and living in Philadelphia may be including remote workers simply by the phrasing of the original IPUMS survey question.

 

[5] “How the Pandemic Has Affected Philadelphia’s Economy and Jobs,” Feb. 09, 2022. https://pew.org/3GhyNB1 (accessed Mar. 14, 2023).

 

"The Economy League's Leading Indicator article serves as a high-quality analysis to deepen understanding of key regional trends and labor market challenges based on publicly available data. Have any questions or additional input on this week's topic? Send us your thoughts at [email protected]