Smart Cafe Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Existing studies have explored either only one or two of the mechanisms that human capital externalities percolate at only macrogeographic levels. This paper uses the 1990 Massachusetts Census data and tests four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the Boston metropolitan area labor market. We propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels: depth of human capital stock, Marshallian labor market externalities, Jacobs labor market externalities, and thickness of the local labor market. We find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across Census blocks. Different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances. For example, the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroid. We conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within microgeographic scope in cities that we call Smart Caf� Cities.

Keywords: Human capital externalities; Labor market agglomeration; Hedonic wage model; Marshallian externalities; Jacobs externalities; Spatial attenation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J24 J31 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2005/CES-WP-05-24.pdf First version, 2005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Smart Cafe Cities: Testing human capital externalities in the Boston metropolitan area (2007)
Working Paper: Smart Café Cities: Testing Human Capital Externalities in the Boston Metropolitan Area (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:05-24

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