Individuals and business owners engage in an increasingly complex array of financial decisions that are critical for their success and well-being. Yet a growing literature documents that in both developed and developing countries, a large fraction of the population is unprepared to make these...

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...

We use data from the military enlistment for a large representative sample of Swedish men to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal interview conducted by a psychologist. Unlike...

We incorporate the concept of social identity into a stylized model of occupational choice and analyze whether an individual’s identity affects his or her decision to become an entrepreneur. We argue that an entrepreneurial identity results from an individual’s socialization. This could be...

This is a theoretical study of human-capital formation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

Two alternative models of parental investments in children's human capital are considered and tested empirically using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS). The pure loan model and the reciprocity with two-sided altruism model yield different predictions about the effect of children's...

If personal computers (PCs) are used to enhance learning and information gathering across a variety of subjects, then a home computer might reasonably be considered an input in an educational production function. Using data on British youths from the British Household Panel Survey between 1991...

How important for success on the job is uninterrupted labor force participation? Data on labor force status for a 15 year period for individual salaried employees in Swedish Industry makes possible the estimation of the effect of years of experience and years of non-experience on earnings. One...

Why do entrepreneurship rates differ so markedly by gender? Using data from a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent personality traits, human capital, and the employment history influence the start-up decision and can explain the gender gap in...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...