Los rendimientos sociales de la formación/educación de la población pueden ser mayores de lo que se pensaba

Evidence from more than 1,500 sub-national regions of the world suggests that regional education is the critical determinant of regional development, and the only such determinant that explains a substantial share of regional variation. Using data on several thousand firms located in these regions, we have also found that regional education influences regional development through education of workers, education of entrepreneurs, and perhaps regional externalities.

The latter come primarily from the level of education (the quality of human capital) in a region, and not from its total quantity (the number of people with some education). A simple Cobb-Douglas production function specification used in development accounting would have difficulty accounting for all this evidence. Instead, we presented a Lucas-Lucas model of an economy, which combines the allocation of talent between work and entrepreneurship, human capital externalities, and migration of labor across regions within a country…

The central message of the estimation/calibration exercise is that, while private returns to worker education are modest and close to previous estimates, private returns to entrepreneurial education (in the form of profits) and possibly also social returns to education through external spillovers, are large. To the extent that earlier estimates of return to education have missed the benefits of educated managers/entrepreneurs, they may have underestimated the returns to education.

Human Capital and Regional Development, Nicola Gennaioli Rafael La Porta Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes Andreu Schleifer Barcelona GSE Working Paper Series Working Paper nº 581 (2012)

Dos aspectos importantes: uno, que las instituciones no son demasiado relevantes para explicar la productividad de una determinada región y, dos, que la formación de los emprendedores/empresarios explica una buena parte de la productividad de las empresas individualmente consideradas. La remuneración de tal contribución se realiza, naturalmente, en forma de beneficios y no de salarios.