Human capital is observed to be an important contributor to growth but unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human...

The past couple of decades have seen what amounts to skills revolution in urban and regional economic research. From industrial location theory and Alfred Marshall’s concern for agglomeration to more recent research on high-tech districts and industrial clusters firms and industries has been...

Research on human capital generally focuses on the regional level, and neglects the relative effects of its distribution between center cities and surrounding suburbs. This research examines the effects of this intra-metropolitan distribution on economic performance. The findings indicate that...

The relationships between talent, technology and regional development have been widely examined in the advanced economies. While there is a general consensus as to the important role talent plays in regional development, debate has emerged on two key issues. The first involves the efficacy of...

While there is a general consensus on the importance of human capital to regional development, debate has emerged around two key issues. The first involves the efficacy of educational versus occupational measures (i.e. the creative class) of human capital, while the second revolves around the...

The role of human capital in shaping cross-national economic performance is well-understood. But human capital is an indirect measure of skill, based on educational attainment. We introduce and test a more direct measure of skill, based on work that is actually performed, measured by occupation....

A longstanding research tradition assumes that endogenous technological development increases regional productivity. It has been assumed that measures of regional patenting activity or human capital are an adequate way to capture the endogenous creation of new ideas that result in productivity...

The prevailing geographic model for high-technology industrial organization has been the “nerdistan,” a sprawling, car-oriented suburb organized around office parks, of which Silicon Valley is the prototypical example. This seems to contradict a basic insight of urban theory, which...

An empirical method to identify the existence of a spatial cluster is proposed. The method, based upon regression analysis, offers researchers to categorise regions, municipalities, or cities with respect to their over- or under-representation in number of establishments and employment for any...

This paper examines the geographic variation in inequality, and it distinguishes between wage and income inequality. Wage inequality is associated with skills, human capital, technology and metro size - in line with the literature on skill-biased technical change. Income inequality is instead...