More than STEM: spillovers from higher education institution infrastructure investments in the arts

Douglas Noonan, Joanna Woronkowicz () and Jessica Sherrod Hale ()
Additional contact information
Joanna Woronkowicz: Indiana University Bloomington
Jessica Sherrod Hale: Indiana University Bloomington

The Journal of Technology Transfer, 2021, vol. 46, issue 6, No 4, 1784-1813

Abstract: Abstract Higher education institutions (HEIs) represent an enormous density of investment and resources, concentrating infrastructure spending and creating high human capital citizens and knowledge spillovers increasingly seen as critical to advancing regional quality of life. While HEIs’ prominent role in promoting regional economic growth, innovation, and attractiveness receives considerable research attention, most of that attention is paid to aspects of HEIs that are directly related to STEM activity. There are various theories that suggest spillovers from non-STEM activity at HEIs as well, specifically in the arts. This study examines whether spillovers occur for HEIs’ large capital investments in the arts. Specifically, we focus on HEI investments in arts physical infrastructure and whether these investments have any effects on regional-level business activity, including jobs and firms. To analyze HEI spillovers of physical arts infrastructure on regional jobs and firms, we use construction starts data on building projects from Dodge Analytics, Inc. and data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which include administrative data for every college, university, and technical/vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid programs. We couple these data with public data on regional-level socioeconomic indicators from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Zip-code Business Patterns data. We employ a quasi-experimental propensity-score matching design in order to control for a host of HEI and regional-level characteristics in examining the impact of infrastructure investments. The results suggest strong and consistent spillover effects (i.e. overall and specifically in the arts industry) for regions with HEIs that make these investments.

Keywords: Spillovers; Higher education institutions; Cultural infrastructure; Arts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10961-020-09825-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:jtecht:v:46:y:2021:i:6:d:10.1007_s10961-020-09825-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10961/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10961-020-09825-2

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Technology Transfer is currently edited by Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel, Barry Bozeman and Simon Mosey

More articles in The Journal of Technology Transfer from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().