Performance pay in general amounts to only a small fraction of total pay. In this paper, we show that performance pay is nevertheless important for the level and dynamics of wages over the life cycle because of the incentives it indirectly provides for human capital acquisition and because of...

In high school and in college, men and women take significantly different courses. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the National Longitudinal Study Class of 1972, we relate these differences in school content to sex differences in adult wages. Differences in...

Going to college is a risky investment in human capital. However, we highlight two options inherently embedded in college education that mitigate this risk: (i) college students can quit without completing four-year degrees after learning about their post-graduation wages and (ii) college...

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...

We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using the changes in compulsory schooling laws for secondary schools in West German states during the period from 1948 to 1970. While our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries, we find very different...

This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two...

This paper estimates the heterogeneous labor market effects of enrolling in higher education short-cycle (SC) programs. Expanding access to these programs might affect the behavior of some students (compliers) in two margins: the expansion margin (students who would not have enrolled in higher...

Investing in college carries high returns, but comes with considerable risk. Financial products like equity contracts can mitigate this risk, yet college is typically financed through non--dischargeable, government-backed student loans. This paper argues that adverse selection has unraveled...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of changes in exogenous parameters such as the interest rate, the length of the working period and initial endowments on the shape of the observed earnings profile. Though this problem can be treated in general, we shall restrict ourselves to...

The purpose of this paper is to consider human capital models of earning behavior over an individual lifetime. A general class of life cycle models relating to individual earnings behavior is developed by considering alternative formulation of the basic Ben- Porath type model. An explicit...