Higher Education Supply, Neighbourhood effects and Economic Welfare

This paper estimates neighbourhood effects in the local provision of higher education, and incorporates them in a welfare analysis of higher education supply. We use an own built dataset on the history of higher education institutions in Italy during 1861-2010 to implement an instrumental variables approach that exploits initial conditions in the pre-unitarian Italian states, interacted with post-unification comprehensive reforms of the university system. We provide robust evidence of local displacement between higher education supply in neighbouring provinces. These effects are mostly concentrated within the same field of study, the same region, and a spatial reach of 90 Km. We show that accounting for these displacement forces is important to evaluate the local economic returns of higher education supply. On average, higher education returns explain more than 4% of local value added per capita. Returns are very localised, and larger in provinces that host university hubs.