I’m attached to a research project on human capital acquisition across Denmark, Norway and Sweden during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project uses individual-level records to track the background, studies and work experience of high school and university graduates over more than a century. The novelty and richness of the source material allows us to offer new insights on the role of higher education in long-term economic development and social mobility.
My research interests include:
- economic history
- human capital, particularly the role of education
- long-term economic growth and productivity
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It is commonly asserted that education is essential to supporting economic growth and improved living standards. And in modern contexts, there is considerable evidence of the gains from education to individuals and society. However, the historic evidence is rather more mixed.
The starting point for my research is Joel Mokyr’s idea that the general level of education of the population may matter less for growth and development than the specialised skills of a relative elite: the ‘upper tail’ of the human capital distribution. I focus specifically on the role of upper-secondary and tertiary-level education — what I define as ‘higher education’ — as a channel for the accumulation of this upper-tail human capital.
My dissertation presents a compilation of papers that examine both who pursued higher education, and how the skills of graduates contributed to economic and social development in the lead-up to and during industrialisation. The empirical setting for my analysis is nineteenth and early twentieth century Scandinavia, drawing on historic source material on the graduates of higher education in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
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Blog
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The first universities were established in the medieval age, connected to the Catholic church and educating only a small handful. A millennium later, and universities have expanded in number, scope and scale: tens of thousands of institutions of higher education exist around the world, with hundreds of millions of students studying fields ranging from the classical (theology, law) to modern sciences and technology.
Despite the explosion in higher education since World War II, the contribution of universities to economic development remains somewhat unclear. Yes, education matters for growth, and university graduates typically have greater earnings potential than non-graduates. But universities as a specific motor for economic growth is, to a large extent, more posited than proven. Valero and Van Reenen attempt to close this gap using data on almost 15,000 universities across 78 countries.
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Why do we experience economic growth? As our economies develop, why do we expect long-term living standards to rise? Such progress is not an immutable law of economic activity. On the contrary, economic growth (on a per capita basis) is a relatively recent phenomenon.
For most of human history, strong economic performance didn’t translate to sustained increases in material standards of living (for which we can use output per capita as a proxy). Rather, a strong economy gave rise to population growth: when times were good, families had more children. It was only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (at least in the developed world) that this dynamic began to change. Why?
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There is broad agreement that human capital — the skills and attribute which influence individuals’ productive capacity — matters for long-term development. But curiously, there is mixed evidence on the role of human capital as a driver of industrialisation.
Part of the problem here may relate to how human capital is measured. At the macroeconomic level, human capital is typically measured with respect to education levels across the population: for example, years of schooling or literacy rates. But this may be less relevant than the ‘upper tail’ of knowledge in society: the select few with highly specialised skills. Mokyr, Sarid and van der Beek (2022) test this idea of upper-tail human capital in eighteenth-century Britain. Specifically, they look at the role of watermills, and the millwrights who were responsible for them.
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