Metropolitan growth and the mobility and immobility of skilled and creative couples across the life course

Abstract

The human capital and creative class hypotheses argue that the agglomeration of skilled and creative people is key to economic growth. Migration is assumed to play an important role in forming these agglomerations. However, the results of this study indicate that while younger cohorts of skilled and creative individuals are highly mobile, skilled and creative couples are highly immobile. This research hypothesizes that it is these relatively immobile skilled and creative couples that are behind the link between urban growth and concentrations of skill and creativity. Indeed, this analysis finds a strong empirical link between concentrations of skilled couples, but not creative class couples, and economic growth. Public policies designed to increase the size of the skilled population should be directed at retaining younger cohorts long enough for them to develop the local networks upon which spillover effects rely.

Keywords:

• creative class
• human capital
• migration
• convergence models

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dean Hanink for his help on this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

^1. Due to limitations of data available from the United States Census Bureau, this paper adopts a narrow and heteronormative description of couples as opposite-sex partners who are married.

^2. In the data used in this analysis, this includes executive, administrative, and managerial occupations; management-related occupations; engineers, architects, and surveyors; mathematical and computer scientists; natural scientists; health-diagnosing occupations; health assessment and treating occupations; therapists; teachers, postsecondary; teachers, except postsecondary; social scientists and urban planners; social, recreation, and religious workers; lawyers and judges; writers, artists, entertainers, and athletes; health technologists and technicians; engineering and related technologists and technicians; science technicians; technicians, except health, engineering, and science; supervisors and proprietors of sales jobs; sales representatives, finance and business services.