The American economy as a whole appears to be evolving toward ever-increasing emphasis on cognitive-cultural forms of production and work calling for high levels of technical and scientific knowledge, interpersonal know-how, and specific kinds of cultural sensibilities. This apparent shift in the forces creating economic growth has brought about a range of policy recommendations, especially for cities and regions experiencing slow growing or stagnant economies. Yet, many of these recommendations are based on assumptions that remain unexamined. The hypothesis driving the proposed project is that these cognitive-cultural activities are concentrating primarily in major metropolitan areas. A subsidiary hypothesis is that as this happens, more routinized, mechanical forms of production and work concentrate in centers at the lower end of the urban hierarchy. Research into these issues will proceed by means of an investigation of temporal and spatial variations in occupational structures and the human capital endowments of US metropolitan areas. The research will proceed initially on the basis of intertemporal comparisons of occupational location quotients. In order to pin the investigation down in more analytical terms, occupations will also be coded according to some 40 or 50 occupational descriptors as derived from the US Labor Department's Dictionary of Occupations. In this manner, it will be possible to trace out a number of critical changes in human capital endowments across the entire metropolitan hierarchy. Additionally, an extremely detailed cross-section analysis will be undertaken for the year 2000. This analysis will make use not only of micro-data provided by the census, but also the enormous amount of information on occupations now available through the Labor Department's new data base known as O*Net. The O*Net data comprise a total of 483 occupational features in terms of descriptors such as knowledge, skills, abilities, work activities, interests, and work values. The main research activity to be undertaken in this regard will be to construct complex human capital indexes for metropolitan areas and to test further the central hypothesis by subjecting these indices to multivariate analysis. A supplementary facet of this effort will entail an attempt to analyze the human capital content and geography of so-called low-skill jobs in metropolitan areas in order to assess their labor requirements above and beyond simple physical work.
The merit of the project resides principally in the novel approach to human capital in cities. The research goes well beyond current approaches (focusing mainly on educational attainments) and will enrich our understanding of the social economy of the metropolis. The research relates will be useful to policy makers concerned with local labor market development in cities, especially in the areas of job creation, skills, and training. It will also provide a unique perspective on currently fashionable ideas -- especially among urban policy makers -- about creativity in American cities, and it will help to pinpoint some the ways in which urban creativity resides in specific forms of human capital.
