The Capital Asset Pricing Model: An Application on the Efficiency of Financing Higher Public Education in Egypt

In the Markowitz (1952) mean-variance model as well as the Capital Asset Pricing Model of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965) agents make their investment decisions based solely on the expected return and variance. On the other hand, human capital theory does not consider uncertainty in its return function except recently initiated by Harmon et al. (2001) who distinguish between the level and the years of education and incorporate uncertainty in Mincer’s Model (1974). This study has twofold objectives: First, estimate the risk-return trade-off of the public higher education capital stock in Egypt to indirectly evaluate the performance of its current financing system, and second, investigate the inter-linkage between real investment (human) and financial investment (lost opportunity or access to funds), then draw the channel through which they can affect the economic growth.