Does Education Matter for Economic Growth?

Empirical economic research typically uses education as a proxy for human capital. However, research aimed at validating the inclusion of education measures in growth regressions has yet to reach a consensus, often finding that the sign and significance of education depends on the sample of observations or the specification of the model. The goal of this paper is to reconcile the conflicting empirical evidence and validate (or invalidate) the inclusion of education in international growth regressions by providing a rigorous and systematic search for significance of education. Using methods which are largely immune to model misspecification, we examine six of the most comprehensive education databases in an attempt to identify a robust empirical link between mean years of schooling and economic growth rates. Contrary to a few recent papers that have identified significant nonlinearities between education and growth, our results show that the inclusion of mean years of schooling in growth regressions is not warranted.