This paper examines why smart cities are growing by exploring the relationship between the college share in a city and migration to and from the city. The results suggest that the greater inmigration to smart cities is almost entirely due to persons moving to pursue higher education. Smart...

This paper examines why smart cities are growing by investigating who moves to smart cities and who stays. Smart cities are often centers of higher education, so students moving to pursue higher education may play an important role. I find that the greater in-migration to smart cities is mostly...

We examine the effects of recently adopted state merit-based financial aid programs on college attendance and degree completion. Our primary analysis uses microdata from the 2000 Census and 2001-2010 American Community Survey to estimate the effects of merit programs on educational outcomes for...

There is growing concern in the U.S. that the nation is producing too few college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and there is a desire to understand how various policies affect college major decisions. This paper first uses student administrative...

Areas surrounding colleges and universities are often able to build their local stock of human capital by retaining recent graduates in the area after they finish their education. This paper classifies 41 U.S. metropolitan areas as "college towns" and investigates differences in employment...

Since 1991 more than two dozen states have adopted merit-based student financial aid programs, intended at least in part to increase the stock of human capital by improving the knowledge and skills of the state’s workforce. At the same time, there has been growing concern that the U.S. is...

Economics has been shown to be a relatively high earning college major, but geographic differences in earnings have been largely overlooked. This paper uses the American Community Survey to examine geographic differences in both absolute earnings and relative earnings for economic majors. We...

Research suggests that merit scholarship programs increase college enrollment in states that adopt them but post-college migration may limit the effect these programs have on the stock of college-educated labor in those states. In this paper we consider the effect of Georgia's HOPE Scholarship...

Since 1991 more than two dozen states have adopted merit-based student financial aid programs, intended at least in part to increase the stock of human capital by improving the knowledge and skills of the state's workforce. At the same time, there has been growing concern that the U.S. is...

One goal of state merit-based financial aid programs is to increase the stock of college-educated labor in the state by retaining college-educated persons in the state after college. However, there has been surprisingly little research on whether state merit aid programs are effective at this...