• DOI:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2011.02448.x
• Corpus ID: 18760641

Do Educated Leaders Matter?

@article{Besley2011DoEL,
  title={Do Educated Leaders Matter?},
  author={Timothy J. Besley and Jose G Montalvo and Marta Reynal�?Querol},
  journal={Labor: Human Capital eJournal},
  year={2011}
}

• T. Besley, Jose G Montalvo, Marta Reynal�?Querol
• Published 1 August 2011
• Economics
• Labor: Human Capital eJournal

This article uses data on more than 1,000 political leaders between 1875 and 2004 to investigate whether having a more educated leader affects the rate of economic growth. We use an expanded set of random leadership transitions because of natural death or terminal illness to show, following an earlier paper by Jones and Olken (2005), that leaders matter for growth. We then provide evidence supporting the view that heterogeneity among leaders’ educational attainment is important with growth being higher by having leaders who are more highly educated.