The economic impact of universities: Evidence from across the globe
By Anna Valero, John Van Reenen. Economics of Education Review, 2016
476 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We develop a new dataset using UNESCO source materials on the location of nearly 15,000 universities in about 1,500 regions across 78 countries, some dating back to the 11th Century. We estimate fixed effects models at the sub-national level between 1950 and 2010 and find that increases in the number of universities are positively associated with future growth of GDP per capita (and this relationship is robust to controlling for a host of observables, as well as unobserved regional trends). Our estimates imply that doubling the number of universities per capita is associated with 4% higher future GDP per capita. Furthermore, there appear to be positive spillover effects from universities to geographically close neighbouring regions. We show that the relationship between growth and universities is not simply driven by the direct expenditures of the university, its staff and students. Part of the effect of universities on growth is mediated through an increased supply of human capital and greater innovation (although the magnitudes are not large). We find that within countries, higher historical university presence is associated with stronger pro-democratic attitudes.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dcea4586b7ea3ca412dc4c52b3506e5a939109db
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- John Van Reenen
- Nicholas Bloom
- Heidi L. Williams
- Paravee Maneejuk
- Woraphon Yamaka
- Philippe Aghion
- Giovanni Caggiano
- Ruediger Bachmann
Citations in the corpus
- A toolkit of policies to promote innovation (2019, background): “Valero and Van Reenen (2019) offer a generally positive survey on the impact of universities on productivity overall and innovation specifically.”
- The Impact of Higher Education on Economic Growth in ASEAN-5 Countries (2021, background): “However, relatively few studies focus on how higher education is expanded and utilized [4,5].”