Undergraduates’ late-night antics might keep local residents awake into the wee hours, but boisterous Harvard students boost greater Boston’s bottom line.

The average undergrad spends $2,880 a year at businesses in the Hub, generating 1,314 full-time jobs in the Boston area, according to a University-commissioned report released Friday.

And the tourists who trek from afar to touch John Harvard’s shiny left toe may not improve their luck—but they certainly improve the local economy. Visitors to the University bring in $82 million for surrounding businesses, according to the report, creating 1,630 jobs.

In total, the University generates more than $3.4 billion annually for the metropolitan area, the study found.

While the report had been in the works for a full year, its release comes amid escalating town-gown tensions. With the Cambridge City Council slated to consider a measure this evening calling on Harvard to increase its tax payments to the municipal government, Friday’s report could help the University underscore its substantial contributions to the local economy.

University President Lawrence H. Summers, in a breakfast speech to business leaders Friday morning, said that Harvard’s success and the Boston metro area’s economy are “fundamentally intertwined.”

“With Harvard and the Boston area you have a relationship that is like a marriage without the possibility of divorce,” Summers said.

But that doesn’t preclude the possibility of nuptial discord.

City Council member Anthony D. Gallucio said Harvard has not adjusted its in-lieu-of-taxes payment to Cambridge in over a decade. He and fellow Council member Timothy J. Toomey, Jr., will present a resolution tonight asking Cambridge’s top city lawyer to consider the legality of measures that would compel Harvard to pay a heftier tax bill.

Harvard and MIT “have very well-healed real estate arms, and they’re operating as corporations with enormous endowments,” Gallucio said in an interview last night. He said the measures would send “a strong message that our taxpayers are getting hit across the city,” and that “it’s just not acceptable” for Harvard and MIT to shirk their tax burden.

Gallucio said that in the past, the University has only periodically increased its payment-in-lieu-of-taxes as a “quid-pro-quo” for city concessions on development issues. But he said the city and the University need to agree on a “more dignified process” in which Harvard’s payments rise in step with homeowners’ tax bills.

Unless the city can secure new funding from its universities, Gallucio said, Cambridge faces “a strong concern that we could be taxing out seniors and middle-income homeowners.”

Friday’s report recognized that economic instability over the last few years has heightened pressures on municipal and Massachusetts budgets. But “despite its tax-exempt status, Harvard helps in several ways to bolster state and local government finances,” the report said.

In sum, the University generates more than $162 million in state and local government revenues, the study found.