Education and Economic Growth: A Meta-Regression Analysis

This paper surveys the literature that examines the effect of education on economic growth. Specifically, we apply meta-regression analysis to 56 studies with 979 estimates and show that there is substantial publication selection bias towards a positive impact of education on growth. Once we account for this, we find evidence of a genuine effect of education on economic growth. The variation in reported estimates can be attributed to differences in the measurement of education and study characteristics, most importantly model specification, estimation methodology, type of data and the research outlet where studies were published, e.g. academic journals vs. working papers.