Human capital agglomeration and social returns to education in Colombia

Borradores de Economia
Número: 
883
Publicado: 
Clasificación JEL: 
J2, J3
Palabras clave: 
Social Returns, Private Returns, externalities

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María Teresa Ramírez-Giraldo, Karina Acosta, Olga Lucia Acosta Navarro, Lucia Arango-Lozano, Fernando Arias-Rodríguez, Oscar Iván Ávila-Montealegre, Oscar Reinaldo Becerra Camargo, Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía, Grey Yuliet Ceballos-Garcia, Luz Adriana Flórez, Juan Miguel Gallego-Acevedo, Luis Armando Galvis-Aponte, Luis M. García-Pulgarín, Andrés Felipe García-Suaza, Anderson Grajales, Daniela Gualtero-Briceño, Didier Hermida-Giraldo, Ana María Iregui-Bohórquez, Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri, Karen Laguna-Ballesteros, Francisco Javier Lasso-Valderrama, Daniel Márquez, Carlos Alberto Medina-Durango, Ligia Alba Melo-Becerra, María Fernanda Meneses-González, Juan José Ospina-Tejeiro, Andrea Sofía Otero-Cortés, Daniel Parra-Amado, Juana Piñeros-Ruiz, Christian Manuel Posso-Suárez, Natalia Ramírez-Bustamante, Mario Andrés Ramos-Veloza, Jorge Leonardo Rodríguez-Arenas, Alejandro Sarasti-Sierra, Bibiana Taboada-Arango, Ana María Tribín-Uribe, Juanita Villaveces
Carlos David Ardila-Dueñas, Joel Santiago Castellanos-Caballero, Carlos David Murcia-Bustos

We provide evidence of private returns to education and of externalities which jointly render social returns to education in Colombia. The spillover is generated by the share of college-educated workers within the working-age population. Thus, the higher this share in the cities, the higher the wages. The size of the externality is about 1.13; that is, an increase of one percentage point in the share will increase wages by 1.13%. For mid-to-high and high educated workers the externality is about 1.07 and 1.3 while for low educated workers it is 0.92,. The public policy program instituted by the agency in charge of promoting undergraduate and graduate education has contributed to increase wages all over the country but mainly in cities different from Bogotá. A positive correlation between the size of cities and human capital agglomeration is also observed; as a result, the size of cities also has predictive power on the externality.