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:
- long-term economic growth and productivity
- human capital, particularly the role of education
- economic history
- macroeconomic theory
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The contribution of education to economic development is difficult to assess. On the one hand, in contemporary settings, there is little doubt that education matters for innovation and growth — to say nothing of its direct benefits for those who receive education. On the other hand, historical evidence on education’s role is mixed. Scandinavia is a good case study: Denmark, Norway and Sweden all had relatively high rates of literacy by 1800, but were at the same time also relatively poor.
But maybe it is not the basic education level of the masses that, at least in pre-industrial times, had the greatest effect on development. Rather, we should perhaps look to what Mokyr describes as the ‘upper tail’: the relative few with a high level of useful skills. Some existing empirical work provides tentative support for this idea, but comprehensive measures of the ‘upper tail’ remain elusive. In a new working paper, Kristin Ranestad, Paul Sharp and I document a novel set of sources for charting the educated elite: biographies.
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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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