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A researcher’s guide to the Swedish compulsory school reform

Author

Listed:
  • Nix, Emily

    (University of Southern California.)

Abstract
To produce output for a firm, coworkers often interact. This paper examines the possibility that as a byproduct of these interactions, there are learning spillovers: coworkers learn general skills from each other that increase future productivity. In the first part of t he paper I show t hat learning spillovers imply externalities in the return to human capital which firms may not internalize when there is asymmetric information. As a result, individuals may inefficiently invest in their own education. Next, I show that learning spillovers are empirically relevant. Using matched administrative data from Sweden and a combination of fixed effects and controls to address bias from worker sorting and firm heterogeneity, I find that increasing the average education of a given worker’s coworkers by 10 percentage points increases that worker’s wages in the following year by 0.3%, which is significant at the 1% level. The effect is persistent, decreases with age, and is higher for workers in occupations where they interact more regularly with their coworkers.

Suggested Citation

  • Nix, Emily, 2020. "A researcher’s guide to the Swedish compulsory school reform," Working Paper Series 2020:14, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2020_014
    as

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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Human Capital Accumulation; Diffusion of Knowledge; Learning;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity

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