The rise of the dual career household is a recent phenomenon spurred by the increase in married women's labor force participation rates and educational attainment rates. Compared to traditional households these households must solve a colocation problem. This paper documents trends in locational choice between large and small metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas by household type from 1940 to 1990. We find that college educated couples are increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas and attribute at least half of this increase to the growing severity of the colocation problem. We also find that the relative returns for a college-educated couple of being in a large relative to a small city have increased across decades. Our results suggest that because skilled professionals are increasingly bundled with an equally skilled spouse, smaller cities may experience reduced inflows of human capital relative to the past and therefore become poorer. We examine how the relationship between rankings of university graduate programs and city size has changed between 1970 and 1990 to provide suggestive evidence on the importance of city size to firms' ability to attract the best workers.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
7109.
Length: Date of creation: May 1999 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7109
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Glaeser, Edward L & Mare, David C, 2001.
"Cities and Skills,"
Journal of Labor Economics,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 19(2), pages 316-42, April.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Glaeser, E.L. & Mare, D.C., 1994.
"Cities and Skills,"
Papers
e-94-11, Stanford - Hoover Institution.
Edward L. Glaeser & David C. Mare, 1994.
"Cities and Skills,"
NBER Working Papers
4728, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Gautier, Pieter A. & Svarer, Michael & Teulings, Coen N., 2005.
"Marriage and the City,"
IZA Discussion Papers
1491, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
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Pieter Gautier & Michael Svarer & Coen Teulings, 2005.
"Marriage and the City,"
CAM Working Papers
2005-01, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics.
[Downloadable!]
Gautier, Pieter A & Svarer, Michael & Teulings, Coen N, 2005.
"Marriage and the City,"
CEPR Discussion Papers
4939, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)