Human capital spillovers in Dutch cities: consumption or productivity?

Abstract

We study the recursive relationship between the ability of Dutch cities to attract recent graduate human capital to their labour—or housing markets and a city’s skills structure, using a comprehensive dataset and a novel operationalisation strategy. We disentangle production and consumption spillovers by separating out human capital employed in a city’s labour market and human capital present in a city’s resident population, respectively. We do so for both the recent graduates flowing into Dutch cities to find work and a residential location, as well as for the incumbent workers and population. We control for the effects of a city’s skills endowments, its (non-) economic characteristics and those of other relevant cities. We find positive effects of a relatively strong graduate labour market inflow on the share of higher and scientific-level jobs. Production spillovers therefore predominantly occur among the higher skilled. Contrary to the higher educated incumbent population, which appears to prefer high skilled services, recent graduate inflows to residential areas have positive effects on the share of jobs requiring lower and medium skills. Consumption spillovers from graduate residential inflows thus occur between higher and lower skilled.