IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedcwp/1231.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measures beyond the college degree share to guide inter-regional comparisons and workforce development

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan D. Whitaker

Abstract

Raising the share of adults with college degrees in a region or jurisdiction is a nearly universal goal of regional policymakers. They believe that education, as summarized by this statistic, is the cause of increasing employment, productivity, and wages. Using statistics estimated from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, this analysis demonstrates how different measures would suggest different rankings of more successful versus less successful metro areas. The \"place-of-birth\" variable in Census data enables a disaggregation of the origins of the skilled and unskilled adult populations. This provides insight into whether high-skilled regions developed talent among natives or attracted talent nationally or globally. I find that metros in states that are successful at getting their natives through college have experienced lower growth in their native and migrant graduate populations. With a few exceptions, metro areas with high degree shares or large improvements in their degree share have not grown their graduate population at unusually high rates. The numbers suggest that metro areas held up as exemplars of educational attainment have achieved this distinction to a large extent by being unattractive to nongraduates.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan D. Whitaker, 2012. "Measures beyond the college degree share to guide inter-regional comparisons and workforce development," Working Papers (Old Series) 1231, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1231
    DOI: 10.26509/frbc-wp-201231
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201231
    File Function: Persistent Link
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/clevelandfedtenant/clevelandfedsite/publications/working-papers/2012/wp-1231-measures-beyond-college-degree-share-to-guide-inter-regional-workforce-development-pdf.pdf
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.26509/frbc-wp-201231?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Berry, Christopher R. & Glaeser, Edward L., 2005. "Divergence of Human Capital Levels across Cities," Working Paper Series rwp05-057, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    2. Paul W. Bauer & Mark E. Schweitzer & Scott A. Shane, 2012. "Knowledge Matters: The Long‐Run Determinants Of State Income Growth," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(2), pages 240-255, May.
    3. Edward L. Glaeser & Matthew G. Resseger, 2010. "The Complementarity Between Cities And Skills," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 50(1), pages 221-244, February.
    4. Christopher R. Berry & Edward L. Glaeser, 2005. "The divergence of human capital levels across cities," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 84(3), pages 407-444, August.
    5. Christopher R. Berry & Edward L. Glaeser, 2005. "The Divergence of Human Capital Levels Across Cities," NBER Working Papers 11617, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Edward L. Glaeser & Joshua D. Gottlieb, 2009. "The Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economies and Spatial Equilibrium in the United States," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(4), pages 983-1028, December.
    7. Christopher R. Berry & Edward L. Glaeser, 2005. "The Divergence of Human Capital Levels across Cities," Harvard Institute of Economic Research Working Papers 2091, Harvard - Institute of Economic Research.
    8. Edward L. Glaeser & Kristina Tobio, 2008. "The Rise of the Sunbelt," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 74(3), pages 610-643, January.
    9. Bacolod, Marigee & Blum, Bernardo S. & Strange, William C., 2009. "Skills in the city," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 136-153, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stephan D. Whitaker, 2016. "Industrial Composition and Intergenerational Mobility," Working Papers (Old Series) 1533R, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, revised 22 Oct 2020.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kristian Behrens & Gilles Duranton & Frédéric Robert-Nicoud, 2014. "Productive Cities: Sorting, Selection, and Agglomeration," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 122(3), pages 507-553.
    2. Suzanne Kok & Bas ter Weel, 2014. "Cities, Tasks, And Skills," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 54(5), pages 856-892, November.
    3. Combes, Pierre-Philippe & Duranton, Gilles & Gobillon, Laurent & Roux, Sébastien, 2012. "Sorting and local wage and skill distributions in France," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(6), pages 913-930.
    4. Jorge De La Roca & Diego Puga, 2017. "Learning by Working in Big Cities," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(1), pages 106-142.
    5. Jaison R. Abel & Todd M. Gabe & Kevin Stolarick, 2014. "Skills across the Urban–Rural Hierarchy," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(4), pages 499-517, December.
    6. David H. Autor, 2019. "Work of the Past, Work of the Future," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 109, pages 1-32, May.
    7. Peter Sunley & Ron Martin & Ben Gardiner & Andy Pike, 2020. "In search of the skilled city: Skills and the occupational evolution of British cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(1), pages 109-133, January.
    8. Breandán Ó hUallacháin, 2011. "Does inventive intensity affect urban prosperity?," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(4), pages 401-420, November.
    9. Edward L. Glaeser & Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto & Kristina Tobio, 2014. "Cities, Skills and Regional Change," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(1), pages 7-43, January.
    10. Mikaela Backman, 2014. "Human capital in firms and regions: Impact on firm productivity," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 93(3), pages 557-575, August.
    11. Mikaela Backman & Pia Nilsson, 2018. "The role of cultural heritage in attracting skilled individuals," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 42(1), pages 111-138, February.
    12. Suzanne Kok & Bas ter Weel, 2014. "Cities, Tasks and Skills," CPB Discussion Paper 269, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    13. Suzanne Kok, 2012. "The division of labour across German cities and the extent of the market," ERSA conference papers ersa12p617, European Regional Science Association.
    14. Jorge De la Roca & Gianmarco I P Ottaviano & Diego Puga, 2023. "City of Dreams," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 21(2), pages 690-726.
    15. Edward L. Glaeser & Joshua D. Gottlieb, 2008. "The Economics of Place-Making Policies," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 39(1 (Spring), pages 155-253.
    16. Winters, John V., 2020. "Problem on the Plains: College Earnings Premiums in Small Metropolitan Areas," Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, Mid-Continent Regional Science Association, vol. 51(1), December.
    17. Paula Prenzel & Simona Iammarino, 2021. "Labor Force Aging and the Composition of Regional Human Capital," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 97(2), pages 140-163, March.
    18. Edward L. Glaeser & Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto & Kristina Tobio, 2010. "The Varieties of Regional Change," Working Papers 472, Barcelona School of Economics.
    19. John V. Winters, 2013. "Human capital externalities and employment differences across metropolitan areas of the USA," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 13(5), pages 799-822, September.
    20. Matthias Wrede, 2013. "Heterogeneous skills, migration, and commuting," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 92(2), pages 345-360, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Regional economics; Education - Economic aspects;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1231. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: 4D Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbclus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.