Aims and motivation

This workshop aims at promoting interdisciplinary perspectives on the individual, regional and cross-country differences in schooling and their change in the past and in the long run. This workshop will provide a platform where quantitative and qualitative contributions inform each other.

The diffusion of education has been unevenly distributed in space and time, across as well as within countries. Economic historians have increasingly taken advantage of such variation across places to examine (i) the relationship between education and economic development and (ii) the determinants of schooling and human capital. Similar issues have been investigated by historians and historians of education, who have explored regional variations in schooling through analyses of national politics bringing about standardization and homogenization, and in studies of the local and regional contexts of education, shedding further lights on the complex settings that enabled the rise of mass schooling.

The main focus of the workshop will be the rise of primary and secondary education across individuals, countries, and regions in the last two centuries, even though we also welcome contributions on different educational levels, as well as different historical periods and topics linked to schooling, education, and human capital. Contributions on all world regions and countries are encouraged. More specifically, we want to promote submissions from a broad range of disciplines that shed light on fundamental aspects of regional variation in schooling, its determinants and impact on social and economic development.

These include:

1. The distribution of schooling and education across individuals, regions, and countries.

2. New ways to measure human capital.

3. New methodological approaches and sources to investigate education and human capital quantitatively (e.g. text analysis).

4. The economy and the demand for schooling.

5. Demography and education.

6. Education reforms and their impact on individual and/or regional inequality.

7. School finance and teacher salaries.

8. Gender educational inequality.

9. The local history of schooling

Scientific committee

Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Gabriele Cappelli (Università di Siena)
Julio Martínez-Galarraga (Universitat de Barcelona)
Johannes Westberg (University of Groningen)

Organising committee

Alfonso Díez-Minguela (Universitat de València)
Pau Insa-Sánchez (Università di Siena)
Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat (Universitat de València)