A researcher’s guide to the Swedish compulsory school reform

Emily Nix ()
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Emily Nix: University of Southern California., Postal: University of Southern California.

No 2020:14, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: To produce output for a firm, coworkers often interact. This paper examines the possibility that as a byproduct of these interactions, there are learning spillovers: coworkers learn general skills from each other that increase future productivity. In the first part of t he paper I show t hat learning spillovers imply externalities in the return to human capital which firms may not internalize when there is asymmetric information. As a result, individuals may inefficiently invest in their own education. Next, I show that learning spillovers are empirically relevant. Using matched administrative data from Sweden and a combination of fixed effects and controls to address bias from worker sorting and firm heterogeneity, I find that increasing the average education of a given worker’s coworkers by 10 percentage points increases that worker’s wages in the following year by 0.3%, which is significant at the 1% level. The effect is persistent, decreases with age, and is higher for workers in occupations where they interact more regularly with their coworkers.

Keywords: Human Capital Accumulation; Diffusion of Knowledge; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 77 pages
Date: 2020-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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