HUMAN CAPITAL AND URBAN GROWTH IN ITALY, 1981–2001

Francesco Giffoni, Matteo Gomellini and Dario Pellegrino

Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 2019, vol. 31, issue 1-2, 77-101

Abstract: Over the last decades of the XX century, human capital has emerged as a critical source of agglomeration economies fueling urban growth in advanced economies. Focusing on the Italian case, this paper assesses the contribution of human capital to urban growth, the latter gauged by employment growth between 1981 and 2001. A 10% higher share of college‐educated residents prompted a higher growth in employment in the 0.5–2.2% range. These results hold controlling for a wide set of urban characteristics and using an instrumental variable approach. By exploiting a spatial localization model, we disentangle the estimated effect into two components related to higher productivity and to higher life quality, respectively. We found that the former contributed to more than 60% of the effect at municipal level, and to over 90% at the wider local labor market level.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rurd.12100

Related works:
Working Paper: Human capital and urban growth in Italy, 1981-2001 (2017)
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:bla:revurb:v:31:y:2019:i:1-2:p:77-101

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0917-0553

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().