TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gennaioli, Nicola
AU  - Porta, Rafael La
AU  - Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio
AU  - Shleifer, Andrei
TI  - Human Capital and Regional Development
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17158
PY  - 2011
Y2  - June 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w17158
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17158
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17158.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicola Gennaioli
Department of Finance
Università Bocconi
Via Roentgen 1
20136 Milan, Italy
E-Mail: nicola.gennaioli@unibocconi.it

Rafael La Porta
Brown University
70 Waterman Street
Room 101
Providence, RI 02912
E-Mail:  rafael.laporta@brown.edu

Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes
SKEMA Business School
60 Rue Dostoievski
Sophia Antipolis, 06902
France
Tel: 0033 04 93 95 32 01
E-Mail: florencio.lopezdesilanes@skema.edu

Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu
AB  - We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world's surface and 96 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital determinants of regional development with an examination of productivity in several thousand establishments located in these regions. To organize the discussion, we present a new model of regional development that introduces into a standard migration framework elements of both the Lucas (1978) model of the allocation of talent between entrepreneurship and work, and the Lucas (1988) model of human capital externalities. The evidence points to the paramount importance of human capital in accounting for regional differences in development, but also suggests from model estimation and calibration that entrepreneurial inputs and human capital externalities are essential for understanding the data.
ER  -