The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality

Paolo Martellini, Todd Schoellman and Jason Sockin

No 791, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We measure college graduate quality — the average human capital of a college’s graduates—using the average earnings of the college’s graduates adjusted to a common labor market. Our implementation uses the database of the website Glassdoor, which has the necessary information on earnings and education for non-migrants and migrants who graduate from roughly 3,300 colleges in 66 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50 percent more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences. Poorer countries do not just lose a higher share of their skilled workers; their emigrants are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives, both within and across countries.

Keywords: Human capital; Entrepreneurship; Migration; Development; Innovation; College quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J30 J60 O11 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-int, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp791.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmwp:93935

DOI: 10.21034/wp.791

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().