The effect on economic development of creative class versus human capital: panel evidence from German regions

Abstract

Esubalew Alehegn Tiruneha, Silvia Sacchettib & Ermanno C. Tortiac* a Department of Economics, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, USAb Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italyc Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Trento, ItalyCONTACT Ermanno C. Tortia ermanno.tortia@unitn.it Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Trento, ItalyABSTRACTThe creative class thesis considers the creative class, compared to human capital, as a better driver of regional economic development. We test this thesis for Germany. We measure creative class and human capital by occupation and education, respectively using classification codes from The Sample of Integrated Labor Market Biographies (SIAB), and proxy regional economic development by per capita income and employment. Our panel estimation results with system GMM show that the human capital effect on per capita income is substantially stronger than the creative class, while the creative class drives employment far better than human capital does. The evidence does not support the notion that the creative class drives development better than human capital.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.