What is the effect of an increase in the overall level of human capital on the economy of a city? Although much is known about the private return to education, much less is known about the more important question of what happens to productivity, wages and land prices when the aggregate stock of human capital in a city increases. Increases in the aggregate stock of human capital can benefit society in ways that are not fully reflected in the private return of education. Human capital spillovers can in theory increase aggregate productivity over and above the direct effect of human capital on individual productivity. Furthermore, increases in education can reduce criminal participation and improve voters' political behavior. In this paper, I review what we know about social returns to education, with a particular emphasis on those externalities that accrue to local geographic areas. The focus of the paper is on the empirical issues that arise in identifying these externalities and on the existing empirical evidence on their magnitude. This paper was prepared as a chapter for the forthcoming Handbook of Urban and Regional Economics.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
9641.
Length: Date of creation: Apr 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9641
Note: CH ED Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.