Using two Dutch labour force surveys, employment assimilation of immigrants is examined. We observe marked differences between immigrants by source country. Non-western immigrants never reach parity with native Dutch. Even second generation immigrants never fully catch up...

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision towork in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as apuzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee.Information on income...

Firms hiring fresh graduates face uncertainty on the future productivity of workers. Intuitively,one expects starting wages to reflect this. Formal analysis supports the intuition...

While uncertainty abounds in almost any decision on investment in schooling, it is mostly ignored in research and virtually absent in labour economics text books. This paper documents the scope for risk, discusses the tough disentanglement of heterogeneity and risk, surveys the analytical...

The risk of investment in schooling has largely been ignored. We assess the variance in the rate of return by surveying the international empirical literature from this fresh perspective and by simulating risky earnings profiles in alternative options, choosing parameters on basis of the very...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lottery and deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion. This allows direct testing of common hy-poth-eses on risk atti-tudes in three datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed falls with income and wealth. Entre-preneurs are...

We use a unique data set about the future wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex-ante, suggesting that students use very little private information about their wage prospects. Expectations appear much more anchored to perceptions of actual contemporaneous market data....