Smart Cities: Quality of Life, Productivity, and the Growth Effects of Human Capital

From 1940 to 1990, a 10% increase in a metropolitan area's concentration of college-educated residents was associated with a 0.8% increase in subsequent employment growth. Instrumental variables estimates support a causal relationship between college graduates and employment growth, but show no evidence of an effect of high school graduates. Using data on growth in wages, rents, and house values, I calibrate a neoclassical city growth model and find that roughly 60% of the employment growth effect of college graduates is due to enhanced productivity growth, the rest being caused by growth in the quality of life. This finding contrasts with the common argument that human capital generates employment growth in urban areas solely through changes in productivity.

• Publication year

  2005

• Venue

  Review of Economics and Statistics

• Publication date

  2005-09-01

• Fields of study

  Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1162/rest.88.2.324
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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