Local human capital externalities and wages at the firm leve : the case of Italian manufacturing

We exploit presumably exogenous variation in the availability of college-educated workers at the province level produced by a reform that increased the supply of higher education to estimate human capital production externalities for Italian manufacturing firms. We show that when the potential endogeneity of local human capital is addressed, the elasticity of white-collar workers’ wages with respect to the local college share is around 0.1, while we find no evidence of a positive effect of local human capital on blue-collar workers’ wages.