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Home | Events Archive | The Education-Innovation Gap
Seminar

The Education-Innovation Gap


  • Series
  • Speaker(s)
    Barbara Biasi (Yale University, United States)
  • Field
    Empirical Microeconomics
  • Location
    Online
  • Date and time

    April 12, 2022
    15:30 - 16:30

This paper documents differences across higher-education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Comparing the text of 1.7M syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a syllabus’s relative proximity to old and new knowledge. We show that courses differ greatly in the extent to which they cover frontier knowledge. More selective and better funded schools, and those enrolling socio-economically advantaged students, teach more frontier knowledge. Third, instructors play a big role in shaping course content; research-active instructors teach more frontier knowledge. Lastly, the presence of frontier knowledge is strongly related to students’ ability to innovate and their labor market outcomes. Joint paper with Song Ma.

Read full paper here.

If you are interested in joining this seminar online, please contact Nadine Ketel, Paul Muller or Sara Signorelli.