The Causal Impact of Human Capital on R&D and Productivity: Evidence from the United States

Verónica Mies (), Matias Tapia and Ignacio Loeser
Additional contact information
Ignacio Loeser: Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

No 102, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We use census micro data aggregated at the state level data for US cohorts born between 1915 and 1939 to test the impact of secondary and tertiary schooling in the US at the state-cohort level on R&D and TFP growth across industries in 1970. We instrument our measures of schooling by using the variation in compulsory schooling laws and differences in mobilization rates in WWII, which we relate to the education benefits provided by the GI Bill Act (1944). This novel instrument provides a clean source of variation in the costs of attending college. Two-stage least squared regressions find no effect of the share of population with secondary schooling on outcomes such as n R\&D per worker or TFP growth. On the other hand, the share of population with tertiary education has a significant effect on both R&D per worker or TFP growth.

Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gro, nep-ino and nep-knm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2016/paper_102.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Causal Impact of Human Capital on R&D and Productivity: Evidence from the United States
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:red:sed016:102

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().