What drives social returns to education? A meta-analysis
What drives social returns to education? A meta-analysis
Education can generate important externalities that contribute towards economic growth and convergence. In this paper, we study such externalities and their drivers by conducting the first meta-analysis of the social returns to education literature. We analyse over 1,000 estimates from 32 journal articles published since 1993, covering 15 countries of different levels of development. Our results indicate that: (1) there is publication bias (but not citation bias) in the literature; (2) spillovers slow down with economic development; (3) tertiary schooling and schooling dispersion increase spillovers; and (4) spillovers are smaller under fixed-effects and IV estimators but larger when measured at the firm level.
Ying Cuia and Pedro S.Martins
About Authors
Pedro Martins
Pedro S. Martins is Professor of Economics at Nova SBE. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick in 2004. Pedro is a labour economist, having published in several leading journals, including Journal of Labor Economics, American Economic Journal […]