What drives social returns to education? A meta-analysis

Ying Cui and Pedro Martins

World Development, 2021, vol. 148, issue C

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Returns to education; Education externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C36 I26 I28 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X21002667
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: What Drives Social Returns to Education? A Meta-Analysis (2021)
Working Paper: What drives social returns to education? A meta-analysis (2020)
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:eee:wdevel:v:148:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x21002667

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105651

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().