To explain the concentration of human capital in cities, urban theory conjectures that the metropolitan scale provides two sources of returns for the more educated: production benefits, both in terms of wages and non-monetary gains, and consumption benefits. By exploiting a unique survey on...

This paper studies the impact of citizens' human capital on the characteristics of elected politicians in democratic elections for the post of mayor. By using a change in the rules for Italian mayoral elections and a difference-in-differences estimator, I find that cities endowed with a larger...