TY  - JOUR
AU  - Glaeser,Edward L.
AU  - Ponzetto,Giacomo A.M.
AU  - Tobio,Kristina
TI  - Cities, Skills, and Regional Change
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16934
PY  - 2011
Y2  - April 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16934
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16934.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Edward L. Glaeser
Department of Economics
315A Littauer Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-0575
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu

Giacomo Ponzetto
CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Barcelona GSE
C/ Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27
08005 Barcelona
Spain
Tel: +34 93 542 2829
Fax: +34 93 542 2826
E-Mail: gponzetto@crei.cat

Kristina Tobio
Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK St- T347
Cambridge, MA  02138
E-Mail: kristina_tobio@ksg.harvard.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -