TY  - JOUR
AU  - Costa,Dora L.
AU  - Kahn,Matthew E.
TI  - Power Couples:  Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940-1990
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7109
PY  - 1999
Y2  - May 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7109
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7109.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Dora Costa
Bunche Hall 9272
Department of Economics
UCLA
Box 951477
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
Tel: (310) 825-4249
Fax: (310) 825-9528
E-Mail: costa@econ.ucla.edu

Matthew E. Kahn
UCLA Institute of the Environment
Department of Economics
Department of Public Policy
Anderson School of Management
UCLA Law School, Box 951496
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1496
Tel: 310/794-4904
Fax: 310/825-9663
E-Mail: mkahn@ioe.ucla.edu
AB  - The rise of the dual career household is a recent phenomenon spurred by the increase in married women's labor force participation rates and educational attainment rates. Compared to traditional households these households must solve a colocation problem. This paper documents trends in locational choice between large and small metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas by household type from 1940 to 1990. We find that college educated couples are increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas and attribute at least half of this increase to the growing severity of the colocation problem. We also find that the relative returns for a college-educated couple of being in a large relative to a small city have increased across decades. Our results suggest that because skilled professionals are increasingly bundled with an equally skilled spouse, smaller cities may experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and therefore become poorer. We examine how the relationship between rankings of university graduate programs and city size has changed between 1970 and 1990 to provide suggestive evidence on the importance of city size to firms' ability to attract the best workers.
ER  -