Does Schooling Cause Growth?

Abstract

A number of economists find that growth and schooling are highly correlated across countries. A model is examined in which the ability to build on the human capital of one's elders plays an important role in linking growth to schooling. The model is calibrated to quantify the strength of the effect of schooling on growth by using evidence from the labor literature on Mincerian returns to education. The upshot is that the impact of schooling on growth explains less than one-third of the empirical cross-country relationship. The ability of reverse causality to explain this empirical relationship is also investigated.

Entrepreneurship culture, total factor productivity growth and technical progress: Patterns of convergence towards the technological frontier

“…The range. Bils and Klenow (2000) found an average salary gain associated to an additional year of education of 9.5 per cent, and a range between 5 and 15 per cent for 36 out of 48 countries in their sample.…”

“…The human capital employed to produce output is introduced in the model following the formulation suggested by Bils and Klenow (2000), and is given by…”

Openness to International Trade and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Investigation

“…However, overcoming this problem is not easy because finding a valid instrumental variable (IV) is almost impossible in the cross-country growth works. The reason for this is that growth theories are 4 Using the school enrolment rate as a proxy for the saving rate of human capital is problematic in the literature and leads researchers to employ average years of schooling as more reliable variables for human capital (see, for instance Bils and Klenow (2000), amongst others). We, however, employ the secondary school enrolment rate in order to follow the theoretical framework suggested by Mankiw et al (1992) more strictly as years of schooling are a stock rather than a flow variable for human capital.…”

Do University Rankings Matter for Growth?

“…Barro (1991) found that "poor countries tend to catch up with rich countries if the poor countries have high human capital per person (in relation to their level of per capita GDP)". Benhabib and Spiegel (1994), Bils and Klenow (2000) and Prichett (2001) find a weak relation between education quantity and economic growth.…”