This paper provides novel empirical evidence of the indirect effect of educational attainment on regional economic growth, through its influence on the profitability of investment in physical capital. We test the hypothesis that the regional heterogeneity of the return to physical capital can be...

What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

Urban mobility has become an international problem and several countries have joined together in different consortia, signing international agreements and developing projects with a view to establishing new standards for current mobility levels and the development of the transport systems of the...

College attainment differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper shows that highly educated states employ skill-biased technologies, specialize in skill-intensive industries, but do not pay lower skill premia. A theory based on agglomeration economies is developed to account for these...

The paper examines the relationship between human capital and productivity growth with reference to the Italian regions. Two approaches can be distinguished. One belonging to the neoclassical tradition stresses the accumulation of human capital as a determinant of growth, while the other,...

Since Solow’s (1957) contribution, human capital has a central role in the debate on economic growth as a leading long period development factor. If from a theoretical point of view the role of human capital on economic growth both directly and throughout its use in R&D activities is fully...

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...

This paper contains an analysis of the economic effects of human capital onproduction, measured as Gross Value Added per full-time equivalent worker. To thisend, a Cobb-Douglas type production function has been used, with Gross Value Added(GVA) a function of human capital and private and public...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...