The economic development impacts of universities on regions: do size and distance matter? Economic Development Quarterly

As American colleges and universities have increasingly become involved in economic development since the mid-1980s, there has been a concomitant growth of interest in measuring the impacts of higher education on regional economies. This study exam-ines the influences of 4-year colleges and universities in the United States at the metro-politan level, focusing on the internal and external factors that affect the generation of regional economic development impacts, the spatial extent of the impacts, and separat-ing the effects of different university functions. Knowledge-based university activities, particularly teaching and basic research, are found to have substantial positive effects on regional earnings gains. The greatest impacts occur in small- and medium-sized regions, suggesting that universities may be able to act as a substitute for agglo-meration economies. Spatial spillovers across regions are influential as well, indicat-ing a relatively flat spatial gradient of university impacts that stretches to neighboring regions