Human capital agglomeration and social returns to education in Colombia

Luis Arango Thomas and Gabriela Bonilla ()

No 12788, Borradores de Economia from Banco de la Republica

Abstract: We provide evidence of private returns to education and externalities which jointly render social returns in the labor market of Colombia. The spillover in the cities is generated by the share of college educated workers in the working-age population. Thus, the higher is this share in the cities, the higher the wages. The size of the externality is about 0.66; that is, an increase in the share of one percentage point will increase the wage in 0.66%. For highly educated workers the externality is about 0.75 while for low educated it is not significant. The results change in an important way if Bogotá, the capital city of the country, is excluded from the sample. Resources destined by the Colombian Institute for Educational Credit and Technical Studies Abroad (ICETEX) to fund undergraduate and postgraduate studies in provinces affect the outcomes if Bogotá is within the sample. A positive correlation between the size of cities and human capital agglomeration is also observed in such a way that if the former is substituted for the latter, we can still find the spillover.

Keywords: social returns; private returns; externalities. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J2 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2015-05-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-geo, nep-lam and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.banrep.gov.co/sites/default/files/publicaciones/archivos/be_883.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Human capital agglomeration and social returns to education in Colombia (2015)
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:col:000094:012788

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Borradores de Economia from Banco de la Republica
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Clorith Angelica Bahos Olivera ().