Women in Politics: A New Instrument for Studying the Impact of Education on Growth

Abstract

This paper tests the growth model of distance to the technological frontier, which states that the closer an economy is to the frontier, the more important is innovation relative to imitation as a source of productivity growth. Hence, an economy that is closer to the technological frontier should invest more in skilled labor, since innovation is a skill-intensive activity. I use the proportion of female legislators as an instrument for skilled labor, in contrast to the lagged educational expenditures used in Vandenbussche et al. (2006). The results with the new instrument are consistent with the theoretical prediction and the earlier results of Vandenbussche et al. (2006).