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Human Capital Externalities, Departmental Co-Authorship And Research Productivity, Frank Neri, Joan Rodgers

Joan Rodgers

Lucas (1988) hypothesised that human capital externalities explain persistent productivity growth and become manifest via interactions between workplace colleagues. Consistent with the first part of this hypothesis, Fox and Milbourne (2006) concluded that an increase in the average level of human capital in Australian economics departments raised the research productivity of departmental members. This paper tests the robustness of this finding by using a direct, rather than a proxy, measure of human capital and confirms the existence of human capital externalities within Australian economics departments. But we go further by investigating the second part of Lucas’ hypothesis. Whilst there are …