Cold weather cities and regions in the U.S. have been relatively uncompetitive for some years. In this research brief, "Smart Growth: Education, skilled workers and the cold-weather cities", Ed Glaeser finds links between human capital and growth, looks for an exogenous indicator and picks the number of local higher education establishments.
"Cities that cannot draw residents withtheir sunny weather need to be especiallyconcerned about skills. When economictrends turn against cold-weather cities,they must have the skills to reinventthemselves... [B]etter-educated cold-weathermetropolitan areas with higher-skilledworkforces such as Minneapolis-St.Paul and Missoula have endured thepopulation shift toward the Sun Beltby reinventing themselves, and bybeing places that skilled individuals arereluctant to abandon even during hardeconomic times."
[Editor's note: The link below is to a 300KB PDF.]
Thanks to Peter Gordon's Blog
