The knowledge, talent, and ideas that power urban economies do not emerge out of thin air: They are shaped and organized by great research universities. Universities have long played a role in educating people and contributing to a more civilized, tolerant, and democratic society. And in more recent decades, research universities like Stanford and MIT have been credited with helping spur the development of tech clusters in the Bay Area and around Boston. But today, universities play an even more central role as catalysts in the development of advanced urban economies.
A new study by economists at the London School of Economics details just how a big a role universities play in urban economic development. It finds that universities themselves, rather than the innovation or human capital they help produce, actually have a demonstrable impact on economic output, and, even more interestingly, on democratic values.
To get at this, the study mines an incredibly rich trove of historical data from the World Higher Education Database (compiled by the International Association of Universities in conjunction with UNESCO), which covers some 15,000 universities across 1,500 regions in 78 countries. While the dataset goes all the way back to the 11th century, when the term “university” was first used, the researchers focus on the period from 1950 to 2010, when the university began to take on more of a direct role in technological and economic development. The study employs a measure of “university density”—simply the number of universities per capita—which it then correlates to factors including economic performance, innovation, and democratic values. (The authors note that a disadvantage of this measure is that it does not reflect either the size or quality of universities.)
[For more on this story by RICHARD FLORIDA, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...nd-democracy/545051/]
Photo: A student walks through Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Steve Helber/AP
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