University Decentralization as Regional Policy: The Swedish Experiment

Roland Andersson, John Quigley and Mats Wilhelmsson

Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series from Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy

Abstract: During the past 15 years, Swedish higher education policy has emphasized the spatial decentralization of post-secondary education. We investigate the economic effects of this decentralization policy on productivity and output per worker. We rely upon a 14-year panel of output and employment for Sweden’s 285 municipalities, together with data on the location of university-based researchers and students, to estimate the effects of exogenous changes in educational policy upon regional development. We find important and significant effects of this policy upon the average productivity of workers, suggesting that the economic effects of the decentralization on regional development are economically important. We also find evidence of highly significant, but extremely localized, externalities in productivity. This is consistent with recent findings (e.g., Rosenthal and Strange, 2003) on agglomeration in ‘knowledge industries.’

Keywords: agglomeration economies; knowledge spillovers; regional productivity; Social and Behavioral Sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-07-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (88)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/81n6b8fb.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: University decentralization as regional policy: the Swedish experiment (2004)
Working Paper: University Decentralization as Regional Policy: The Swedish Experiment (2002)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:bphupl:qt81n6b8fb

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series from Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().