Globalization and human capital investment: Export composition drives educational attainment

By Emily Blanchard, W. Olney. 2017

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper demonstrates that the composition of a country's exports is an important driver of educational attainment. Using detailed trade data and a gravity-based IV technique, we identify the causal impact of changes in the pattern of a country's exports on subsequent educational attainment. Relying on within-country variation over forty-five years for more than one hundred countries, our empirical analysis shows that exports of low-skill-intensive goods depresses average years of schooling - particularly at the primary level - while exports of skill-intensive goods increases years of schooling - at higher rungs of the educational ladder. Our results provide new insights into which types of sectoral growth are most beneficial for long-term human capital formation and suggest that trade can exacerbate initial differences in factor endowments across countries.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b396ec6a5a2ccc098426427d980a4ad8a0440ee

Citations in the corpus

• The Impact of Trade on Inequality in Developing Countries (2017, unknown): “27See Blanchard and Olney (2017) for the effect of international trade on schooling across countries.”
• Who Needs a Fracking Education? The Educational Response to Low-Skill-Biased Technological Change (2020, unknown): “…recently been found to be a pivotal factor in schooling choices in other settings, from trade shocks in Mexico and around the world (Atkin 2016; Blanchard and Olney 2017), to the housing price bubble in the United States (Charles et al. 2018), to infrastructure and workfare programs in India…”