Do educated leaders matter

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. One of the most robust findings in empirical research is the importance of education in explaining economic outcomes. There is overwhelming evidence that education affects earnings – see, for instance, the summary in Card (1997). It has also been shown that education has an impact on charitable giving and other measures of citizenship – see, for example, Dee (2004) and Milligan et al. (2004). This article examines this issue in a new context. It investigates how the educational attainment of a political leader affects economic growth in a country during the leader’s tenure in office. The core dataset for his study is a sample of more than 1000 political leaders who have been in office between 1875 and 2004. We also use educational data for thes