The Education-Innovation Gap / Barbara Biasi, Song Ma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Biasi, Barbara.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ma, Song.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29853.

NBER working paper series no. w29853

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

This paper studies the dissemination of frontier knowledge through higher education. Applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the text of 1.7M university course syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the "education-innovation gap," a measure of a syllabus's distance from frontier knowledge. Using this measure, we document four new facts. First, courses differ greatly in their education-innovation gap, even after controlling for field, course-level, and time. Second, instructors play an important role in shaping course content. Research-active instructors teach more frontier knowledge, particularly when their research is close to the course topic. Third, access to frontier knowledge is unequal: Schools enrolling more socio-economically advantaged students offer courses with a lower gap. Lastly, students from lower-gap schools are more likely to complete a doctoral degree, produce more patents, and earn more after graduation.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2022.