Net Job Creation

Job creation is a pressing issue for many municipalities. Cities create policies to attract jobs and reduce unemployment. When discussing unemployment levels and the health of the economy, it is important to consider net job creation. Net job creation is the difference between the number of jobs created and lost. Higher employment levels can reduce the need for social services and reduce the size of the social safety net. Employment can also provide positive psychological benefits for the employed.

Peer City Comparison

Louisville ranks 12th out of 17 peer cities in net job creation at 2% in the middle group of peer cities.

Louisville is in the middle of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.

Trends Over Time

All peer cities have higher net job creation than they did during the Great Recession. As of 2016, Louisville sits at the peer mean at 2.7%. From 2012 to 2016, Louisville has performed between the peer mean and the 75th percentile of peer cities.

Comparison Between Most and Least Improved Cities

Tulsa is the most improved city. Although it has seen declines in job creation since 2013, it performs much better than it did in 2003. The least improved city, Knoxville, has fallen from far above the peer mean in 2003 to just above the peer mean in 2016. Louisville has consistently hovered at or slightly above the peer mean.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.