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...

In this paper we use a search and matching model to investigate the economic relationship between training and local economic conditions. We identify two aspects of this relationship going in opposite directions: on the one hand, the complementarity between local knowledge spillovers and...

?When school quality increases with the educational standard set by schools, education before college needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private...

We use data from a nationally representative survey of Italian graduates to study whether Alma Mater matters for employment and earnings three years after graduation. We find that the attended college matters, and that there are important college related differences, both among and within...

Does the peer effect vary with the field of study? Using data from a middle-sized public university located in Southern Italy and exploiting the random assignment of first year students to college accommodation, we find that roommate peer effects for freshmen enrolled in the Hard Sciences are...

We study the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. With a given number of firms, deregulation reduces the size of rents per unit of output that firms can reap by training their...

We study the impact of regulatory barriers to entry on workplace training. We develop a model of training in imperfectly competitive product and labour markets. The model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. As stressed in the literature, with a given...

In this paper we use British data to ask whether local employment density - which we take as a proxy of labor market competition - affects employer - provided training. We find that training is less frequent in economically denser areas. We interpret this result as evidence that the balance of...