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IFS-STICERD Public Economics Seminar

Estimating Aggregate Human Capital Externalities

Ananth Seshadri (University of Wisconsin–Madison), joint with Junjie Guo and Nicolas Roys

Wednesday 09 December 2015 12:30 - 13:45

Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.


About this event

Using measures of Compulsory Schooling Laws as instruments for state average schooling, we find that one more year of average schooling leads to a 6-8% increase in individual wages. The effect is statistically significant and robust to different specifications. We also find the effect to be larger for less-educated workers. The key difference from previous strategies is that, the exogenous variation in average schooling induced by our instruments comes mainly from workers not used directly in the wage regression. We construct a model of human capital accumulation where the average human capital of an economy is allowed to affect the productivity of a typical firm in the economy. The calibration of the model suggests that the elasticity of a firm’s productivity with respect to the average human capital of the economy is about 0.12.

This seminar series is jointly organized by the IFS and STICERD.

IFS-STICERD Public Economics seminars are held on Wednesdays in term time at 12.30-13.45 IN PERSON at the IFS.

Seminar organisers: Stuart Adam (IFS), Monica Costa Dias (IFS), Xavier Jaravel (LSE), Camille Landais (LSE), Attila Lindner (UCL), Joana Naritomi (LSE), and Johannes Spinnewijn (LSE).

For further information please contact Peter Levell: peter_l@ifs.org.uk .

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