"The Rise of the Skilled City", Edward L. Glaeser and Albert Saiz, 2003 (abstract):
For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects, and tests for reverse causality. We also find that skilled cities are growing because they are becoming more economically productive (relative to less skilled cities), not because these cities are becoming more attractive places to live. Most surprisingly, we find evidence suggesting that the skills-city growth connection occurs mainly in declining areas and occurs in large part because skilled cities are better at adapting to economic shocks. As in Schultz (1964), skills appear to permit adaptation.The whole paper (68 pages, pdf format, lots of graphs and regressions) can be downloaded from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve site here. For those with shorter attention spans or slower connections, here's a one-page digest/review (with related research by Glaeser) from the National Bureau of Economic Research. First paragraph:
Possessing or attracting a large population of skilled, educated workers appears to be the key factor in determining whether declining urban areas -- such as the infamous "Rustbelt" manufacturing centers of the 1980s -- chart a path back to prosperity or remain relatively stagnant. In the Rise of the Skilled City (NBER Working Paper No. 10191), NBER researchers Edward Glaeser and Albert Saiz conclude that the percentage of workers with college degrees is a "powerful predictor of urban growth."Send Cleveland to college!