How Large Are Human-Capital Externalities? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws

Abstract

Many economists and policymakers believe that education creates positive externalities. Indeed, average schooling in U.S. states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use variation in child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws over time and across states to investigate whether this relationship is causal. Our results show external returns to education around 1% and not significantly different from zero.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 265 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.