published in: Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2014, 48, 190-198
Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both national and local policymakers in the U.S. have called for efforts to increase the stock of college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, but data availability has thus far prevented researchers from directly connecting STEM education to human capital externalities. This paper uses the 2009-2011 American Community Survey to examine the external effects of college graduates in STEM and non-STEM fields on the wages of other workers in the same metropolitan area. I find that both types of college graduates create positive wage externalities, but STEM graduates create much larger externalities.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.