Here’s some advice for college grads. If you’re having trouble finding work, you may want to move to the big city.

James Pethokoukis writes at the American Enterprise Institute.

Study: Living in big cities helps college grads find better jobs

Cities are good for economic growth. Higher density means higher worker productivity. As Ryan Avent writes in The Gated City, “Density simply facilitates interaction. Interactions translate into wealth when a population is educated and local institutions support private enterprise and entrepreneurship.” Avent calculates that various urban land-use regulations cost US GDP growth as much as a half a percentage point per year.

Along those lines, a new NY Fed study looks at whether college graduates located in big cities are better able to find jobs that match the skills they’ve acquired through their college education. Two measures: First, are undergraduate degree holders working in jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree? Second, are those  college grads working in a job that corresponds to their undergraduate major? The results:

Our estimates suggest that both types of job matching are more likely in the larger and thicker local labor markets available in big cities, with job matching benefits concentrated at the top of the distribution. For example, the probability of a college graduate working in a job requiring a college degree increases from 61.1 percent to 64.5 percent when the population size of a metropolitan area increases from the 50th percentile to the 99.9th percentile. This implies that college degree matching is about 6 percent more likely in a place like New York City than in a place like Syracuse, New York. For the same movement across the urban spectrum, the probability of a college graduate working in a job related to his or her college major increases from 26.7 percent to 29.1 percent, implying that college major matching is about 9 percent more likely.