Cities, skills, and regional change

Edward L. Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto and Kristina Tobio

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S. and finds that few, if any, growth relationships remain constant, including Gibrat's Law. Education does a reasonable job of explaining urban resilience in recent decades, but does not seem to predict county growth a century ago. After reviewing this evidence, we present and estimate a simple model of regional change, where education increases the level of entrepreneurship. Human capital spillovers occur at the city level because skilled workers produce more product varieties and thereby increase labor demand. We find that skills are associated with growth in productivity or entrepreneurship, not with growth in quality of life, at least outside of the West. We also find that skills seem to have depressed housing supply growth in the West, but not in other regions, which supports the view that educated residents in that region have fought for tougher land-use controls. We also present evidence that skills have had a disproportionately large impact on unemployment during the current recession.

Date: 2010-06, Revised 2011-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-hrm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Cities, Skills and Regional Change (2014)
Working Paper: Cities, Skills, and Regional Change (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:1255

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