February 20, 2008
Educated (young) workers and regional growth
By Britton Lombardi, Associate Economist
As the U.S. continues to grow into a knowledge-based economy, human capital and ideas earn a higher premium. Therefore, competition for future economic growth and vitality leaves states and large metropolitan areas vying to attract and retain the young, well-educated population within the U.S., commonly defined as 25- to 39-year-olds with at least a bachelor’s degree. These young and educated adults have certain characteristics that make them particularly appealing to metropolitan areas, such as their especially high mobility and entrepreneurial tendencies.
Among a number of interested parties, policymakers, businesses, and researchers question what attracts these young professionals to certain areas over others. Some of the allure could come from characteristics that are specific to the individual, such as a job offer or personal relationships. However, Yolanda Kodrzycki of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, finds that these young professionals also exhibit certain general preferences. They gravitate toward areas that have high job growth, high average pay, and an array of employment opportunities where they feel possibilities and opportunities abound. At this point in their lives, they are the most flexible, and many may still be trying to choose a career path; therefore, a region that will allow them to explore many options is more attractive to these individuals. The payoff to successful “job matching” can be especially high for younger people because payoffs may accrue over a lifetime career supplemented with further learning and development. This implies that certain industry clusters may help attract specialized human capital to a location. A current trend going back two decades has been that cities with a strong technology industry have appealed to a disproportionate number of these young professionals. However, cities that have focused on other knowledge-intensive industries like finance and real estate have done well too. Metropolitan areas that value human capital and maintain a strong regional economy draw in these young and educated individuals.
Besides the direct advantages of high-wage jobs, the clustering of young professionals in an economy provides spillover benefits of knowledge and innovation through networks among firms and workers. Places such as the San Jose area are legendary for frequent job-hopping among workers, who thereby spread innovation more broadly. Such innovations typically involve tacit knowledge and know-how. Looking at patent data, Jerry Carlino has demonstrated how a higher density of skilled workers leads to a higher level of intellectual property.
Aside from economic opportunity, amenities offered by populous urban areas are also thought to attract young professionals. They often prefer to live in lively neighborhood areas within a few miles of the city center and take into account the affordability of this type of housing. Other amenities that appeal to this population include parks or other areas for walking and outdoor recreation, reliable public services including transportation, vibrant neighborhoods, and a dynamic commercial district. However, the extent to which these amenities matter remains the subject of debate and further study.
Warmer climate has been a magnet for the general U.S. population over recent decades. However, cold-weather cities can seemingly compensate with a combination of vibrant economic opportunities and/or big-city recreational and cultural features. The table below, for example, examines working age college-educated migrants from 1995-2000. Although the metropolitan areas that had the five highest net in-migration rates were located in the South and West, both the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago areas posted relatively high net in-migration rates. Indeed, Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked among the top ten highest for that period.
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A recent discussion paper issued by the New England Public Policy Center further explores the regional concentration of young professionals using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses and the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS).
The concentration of young, educated workers in any one region depends on the extent that its young residents achieve college education and the region’s ability to retain them, as well as attracting others from around the U.S. and abroad. As of 2005, New England had the highest concentration of young, educated individuals in the nation, with 38.6% of its 25- to 39-year-olds holding at least a bachelor’s degree compared with 30.1% for the U.S. (see table below). However, overall educational attainment in the U.S. increased between 1980 and 2005, especially between 1990 and 2005 when the number of college educated, 25- to 39-year-olds soared by 22%. The Middle Atlantic, East North Central, and South Atlantic regions outpaced New England’s rise, although they began with lower percentages.
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The discussion paper further calculates a net migration rate from 2004 to 2005. The rate takes the difference between the gross inflow and outflow of domestic young professionals in relation to the base population of that age group. Migration rates are calculated as described but multiplied by 1000 to make it a rate per 1,000 residents. Using this measure, only the Mountain, South Atlantic, and Pacific regions have positive net migration rates of 20.4, 10.9, and 1.0, respectively. The two Midwest regions, East North Central and West North Central, had the two most negative net migration rates of -9.5 and
Movements of workers to and from abroad have recently become a more integral part of regional work force composition. Using a similar calculation as above, but only accounting for international inflows due to data limitations, New England comes in second highest with international inflows of 14.4 behind only the Pacific with 17.4. The East South Central region reported the lowest inflow of these individuals with 5.1; West North Central comes in second to last with 7.9. The East North Central barely outpaces West South Central as the fourth and third from the bottom with 11.6 and 11.4, respectively. Again, the Midwest appears near the bottom of the rankings, heightening concerns about not only maintaining or attracting domestic young professionals but gaining international ones. In New England’s case, the net inflow of international young professionals seems to offset the region’s domestic losses, but this does not hold true for some of the other regions, including the Midwest.
Although emphasis has been placed on young professionals, the growth in older workers, those aged 55 and above, will be the largest of any working-age group over the next ten years. The older labor force is projected to grow by 46.7% from 2006 to 2016 — more than five times the projected annual growth rate of the overall labor force of 0.8%. This large projected growth rate results from the aging of the baby boom generation into their “golden years” and still participating in the labor force. Older workers may continue to work due to the removal of the earnings test from Social Security, the increased retirement age for receiving Social Security benefits to 67, decreased employer-provided retiree health benefits, and the improved health status of older individuals.
Another reason for employers and regions to focus on older workers stems from the diminishing education attainment gap between young entering workers and older workers. Dan Aaronson and Dan Sullivan document the dramatic overall rise in educational attainment of the U.S. workforce since the 1970s. Educational attainment has been climbing as younger (more educated) cohorts have been displacing older (less educated) cohorts as they retire. Today, younger workers are only as educated, on average, as those that they displace at the older end of the workforce, and their lesser work force experience may put them at a disadvantage in some respects. All the more reason for employers to turn somewhat to older cohorts for tomorrow’s needed work force skills.
As the number of older workers continues to increase, will firms and policymakers shift some of their attention to retaining or enticing these workers by giving them incentives to extend their careers or possibly return to the work force? Older workers offer benefits to businesses that might not be available from young professionals, such as leadership, experience, and specialized skills gained over their lifetime that can increase productivity and output. On the other hand, these older workers have characteristics quite different from those of young professionals. They tend to prefer more flexible work schedules to balance work and family and to be less mobile geographically. Therefore, they may require a slightly different and possibly more demanding set of economic incentives and living amenities.
Posted by Testa at 10:43 AM | Comments (1)
October 30, 2006
Population Ranks of Midwest Cities
Have you ever heard of Zipf’s Law? I’ll bet you haven’t. Zipf’s Law states that there typically appears to be a numerical regularity between the population size and population rank of cities within any particular region or nation. Specifically, within a region or nation, multiplying any city’s population size by its rank among cities will yield a constant number throughout the distribution. For instance, if the most populous city in a nation has a population of 10 million, the constant should be 1.0 multiplied by 10 million; the second largest city should have a population of 5 million so that 2 times 5 million yields 10 million once again; and so on.
As a fun way to display the size distribution of metropolitan areas in the Great Lakes, we tried to fit Zipf’s Law to the size distribution of metropolitan areas for the (census) year 2005. Guess what? We found that Zipf’s Law nailed it.
For the statistical trial, we chose the Great Lakes region which is defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis as the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. As it turned out, and as shown in the chart below, Zipf's regularity applies very closely to the population distribution of Great Lakes metropolitan areas.
My prior thinking was that this region, which we think of as the industrial belt, was a cohesive economic region with close ties among firms and workers. In fact, there is no economic theory at all behind the Zipf’s Law and its relationship between population size and rank. Yet, in choosing a region, I thought it to be a promising trial to choose a region in which we might expect to find the statistical regularity if it was undergirded by economic linkages.
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In the rank distribution, the Chicago metropolitan area leads the pack with approximately 9.4 million. The Detroit area comes in second with, as might be expected, a population of one-half of Chicago’s at 4.5 million. The third metropolitan area, Cleveland, does not quite fit, dropping down too far with a population at just over 2 million. Still, the remaining distribution fits well enough so that G. K. Zipf’s regularity retains our fascination.
Perhaps it is only the statistical geeks among us who love this sort of analysis. Still, almost everyone loves a good horse race. So, for the rest of you, here is a comparative graph of the population growth for the top 10 most populous Great Lakes metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2005. And the winner is … Indianapolis, with a population growth of 27 percent , 346 thousand. What a town!
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Posted by Testa at 6:08 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2006
Foreign born
The recent influx of foreign born into the United States has drawn attention on several public policy fronts. The U.S. Congress is currently considering a tighter border policy with Mexico, in part due to concerns of national security and the rule of law. In addition, the surge in foreign born (and their offspring) figures into debates over the sources of the widening wage and income disparities in the U.S. and in the slow growth of wage rates and income at the bottom of the income distribution.
On a more positive note, the foreign-born population is accounting for approximately one-third of U.S. population growth, somewhat more if the newborn children of recent immigrants are counted. The possible benefit of a more rapid population growth stems from the fact that the U.S. labor force market is already tightening rapidly and promises to tighten further as the “baby boom” generation retires. Slow growth of the work force can ultimately slow the overall pace of economic growth, especially if accompanied by slow growth of workers with specific skills. Indeed, for many regions, one key economic challenge and opportunity is to facilitate education and skills acquisition of the foreign born. As of 2005, the U.S. Department of Labor reports that 28 percent of the foreign born aged 25 years and older had not completed high school versus 7 percent for the native-born.
Prior to the 1990s, as shown by the chart below, the Seventh District region, which includes much or all of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin, had not attracted immigrants to the same extent as many other U.S. regions. Still, as shown by the second chart below, strong growth in immigration has taken place here in recent years. So too, the Chicago metropolitan statistical area (MSA) has remained an exceptionally strong magnet among metropolitan areas. Chicago ranked 5th in foreign-born population according to the 2000 Census of Population, with 17 percent to 18 percent of its population foreign born. And since that time, the Chicago metro area has ranked among the top 10 metro area gainers in numbers of both Asian and Hispanic population.
Recent immigrants (as well as members of other ethnic and minority groups) are, to a greater extent, relocating to new areas of opportunity and high growth. According to recent report by demographer William Frey, “Hispanic and Asian populations are spreading out from their traditional metropolitan centers” and expanding their presence in new destinations, including suburbs and rural areas. In part, this dispersion may be an added impetus to current public policy attention concerning U.S. immigration and border control policies.
The chart below confirms for the Seventh District the dispersion of immigrants and foreign born. All Seventh District states experienced healthy growth of foreign-born population. However, the two states with the lowest proportions of foreign-born population—Iowa and Indiana—experienced the largest population growth rates over the decade of the 1990s at 110 and 98 percent respectively.
The Seventh District experience also confirms that immigrants are now following opportunities in employment and housing to a greater extent rather than simply following their historic well-worn path to the largest U.S. metropolitan areas and their central cities.
The final chart (below) distinguishes the growth in foreign born in each state’s largest metropolitan area from the rest of the state. In those large metropolitan areas where economic growth has been leading state economic growth and where unemployment is generally low, growth in the foreign-born population has exceeded the remainder of the state. This experience has particularly characterized the picture in Des Moines, Iowa, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois. In contrast, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Detroit, Michigan metro area economies have both lagged their respective states and so have their respective growth rates of foreign born population.
In choosing their nation of destination, immigrants have in the past, “voted with their feet” in search of greater freedom and economic opportunity. Within that destination, immigrants often tended to follow well-worn paths, disembarking in cities and communities where their fellow immigrants had preceded them. In contrast, immigrants to the U.S. are today choosing to disembark directly where economic opportunities are greatest. For this reason, the growth rate of the foreign-born population has become yet another indicator in gauging the success of metropolitan areas.
How well immigrants adapt to their new communities, and how well communities adapt to them, will be part of the future equation of success or failure of many U.S. regions.
Posted by Testa at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)
May 5, 2006
Immigration and Chicago's Growth
In preparing for a presentation to be delivered before the ARS National Forum on Regional Stewardship this week, I was prepared to expound on the superior economic performance of Chicago in comparison to neighboring cities. After all, John Grimond’s recent review of Chicago for Economist magazine recently stated that “Chicago has come through deindustrialization looking shiny and confident.” I must admit that I, too, often characterize Chicago’s performance as robust, and I have observed that both Chicagoans and other Midwesterners believe this to be the case. Much to my surprise, however, in examining total payroll employment trends, I discovered that Chicago’s growth fell short of the neighboring East North Central (U.S. Census division) states region during the 1990s and since that time as well! And in comparison to the nation, Chicago’s per capita income has been flat to slightly declining. What gives?
I believe that part of the answer can be explained by the robust influx of immigrants to the Chicago area, along with the high birth rates of recent immigrants, which have made for a more complex story than the payroll employment and income trends suggest.
Owing to immigration, the Chicago area’s population growth has exceeded the surrounding region since the 1990s, as the chart below suggests. The Chicago metro area is now ranked fifth nationally in proportion of foreign-born population, adding 537,000 between 1990 and 2000—an expansion by over one-half. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, 17.5% of Chicago’s population were foreign born, many of them young families with children. And so, the rapid expansion of the region’s housing stock, revitalization of many older neighborhoods, and home appreciation have not been simply the figments of imagination or the heady boosterism by residents and observers of the Chicago region.
The growing immigrant composition of Chicago's work force, and the way we measure it, may also explain part of its tepid payroll employment growth. Owing partly to language barriers, immigrants are more likely to be self-employed rather than work for a firm as a "payroll" employee. So too, to some extent, immigrant payroll employment may also tend to be casual or uncounted by government payroll employment surveys. An alternative way to estimate employment is conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) which takes some account of self-employed workers. In contrast to payroll employment, trends using BEA data (below) suggest that the Chicago area’s employment growth exceeded the East North Central states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin in the early years of this decade, and its performance during the 1990s also converges somewhat with the national average.
A moment’s reflection on the measurement of per capita income may also shed light on Chicago’s seeming lack of per capita income expansion during this period. Immigrant groups vary greatly by educational attainment. A recent paper prepared by Sapna Gupta prepared for Chicago Metropolis 2020 reports that almost two-thirds of working age adult immigrants to Chicago from India have college degrees versus only 3% to 4% of Mexican immigrants. Yet, Mexicans are the dominant immigrant group to Chicago in recent years. Accordingly, since education increasingly determines wage and salary income in our economy, Chicago’s immigrant influx has tended to pull down average income. Of course, immigrant household income, even of the least educated, is likely much higher for them than it would be had they remained in their home country. Accordingly, the attendant diminishment of average per capita income in Chicago does not really reflect falling standards of living of Chicago residents.
So, too, as illustrated below, the age of Chicago’s immigrant households, especially Hispanics, is much younger than the pre-existing population. This will also tend to diminish per capita income, since immigrant households will tend to have many more members who are too young to be earning income. Figures reported by the U.S. Census do show that the share of the Chicago area’s population younger than 25 years of age is greater than the U.S. for the year 2000. This gap between the area and the nation has widened since 1990. In contrast, the surrounding East North Central region reports an older population share than the nation, a gap which developed during the 1990s.
Population by Hispanic Origin, Age, and Gender, Chicago MSA, 2000
The Chicago area has become a different place in many respects over the past 20 years as the foreign-born population has expanded. Not everyone has benefited economically from change, but it is quite likely that, on average, Chicago area households have experienced climbing economic well-being. So, too, Chicago’s economic growth has likely exceeded what it otherwise would have been in the absence of immigration.
While the nation currently debates immigration and southern border reform in the U.S. Congress, Chicago’s primary challenges are of a different order. Many recent immigrants face the typical historic barriers to financial and economic assimilation into the Chicago mainstream: lower beginning levels of income, lesser work force skills, lesser knowledge of customs and procedures, and lower education and school readiness. At a time when much of the Midwest region’s existing population is shifting to Sun Belt locales, many foreign born continue to see opportunity here. To bolster the Chicago economy’s prospects, what actions can Chicago pursue to make the most of these immigrants’ energy, ambitions, ties to their countries of origin, and differing skills and culture?
One arena in which the Chicago area and other immigrant centers has been quite active is in facilitating immigrant access to financial channels. On May 4, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Brookings Institution issued a major study on enhancing the ability of the foreign born to access financial institutions for savings, wealth building and homeownership, payments transactions, and business creation. The study documents the state and progress of immigrant financial practices and access in the United States, along with many lessons learned from diverse perspectives.
Posted by Testa at 1:07 PM | Comments (0)