Cities, Skills, and Regional Change

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 re ‡ects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S. and …nds 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 …nd 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 …nd 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.Comments are appreciated and can be sent to eglaeser@harvard.edu, gponzetto@crei.cat, and kristina_tobio@ksg.harvard.edu.

Ageing Places in an Ageing Country: The Local Dynamics of the Elderly Population in Spain

“…However, as is supported in Coffey and Polèse (1988), Patridge et al (2008), Glaeser et al (2014) and, in the case of Spain, Guti errez et al (2017), population growth is subject to certain factors that affect location choice, giving rise to different spatial patterns depending on local characteristics. To analyse this source of spatial heterogeneity, we pose two hypotheses:…”

“…Besides the urban factors, a wide array of socio-economic ( P 3 SEF 51 c SEF x SEF i ) and amenityrelated factors ( P 5 EA51 c EA x EA i ) should be considered when analysing population dynamics (Chi & Ventura 2011). Underlining the heterogeneous character of the population structure across space and time, Glaeser et al (2014) also suggest the need to consider that different variables have different impacts depending on the area, the moment, or the context. The effects of a given variable can vary considerably across regions depending on the spatial framework (Shearmur & Polèse 2005;Shearmur et al 2007;Glaeser et al 2014), especially if there is a patent spatial heterogeneity, which challenges the accuracy of global estimates.…”

Geography and intra-national home bias: U.S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007

“…Indeed, while in 1947, a little 470% of manufacturing employment was concentrated in the Manufacturing Belt, it was only 40% in 1999 (Holmes and Stevens, 2004). This dramatic decline in the importance of the Manufacturing Belt went hand-inhand with a rise in the importance of the southern states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas, and the emergence of the Sun Belt (Glaeser and Tobio, 2008;Glaeser et al, 2011). Overall, we can say that the spatial distribution of economic activities evolved from one of concentration in the north-east at the turn of the 20th century to one of dispersion towards the south by the end of the 20th century although this pattern was of course not uniform across all industries (Kim, 1995).…”

The Pot Rush: Is Legalized Marijuana a Positive Local Amenity?

“…One so far unexamined question has been whether individuals, on average, view the legalization of marijuana as a positive or negative amenity and whether this has led to changes in individuals' migration decisions and the spatial equilibrium of the U.S. population. There is a large literature examining how household migration decisions help shape human geography (e.g., Blanchard and Katz 1992;Glaeser, Ponzetto, and Tobio 2014). The typical starting point is the neoclassical model of spatial equilibrium pioneered by Rosen (1974) and Roback (1982).…”