How valuable is education for entrepreneurs’ performance as compared to employees’? What might explain any differences? And does education affect peoples’ occupational choices accordingly? We answer these questions based on a large panel of US labor force participants. We show that...

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to education in Portugal over the 1980s andearly 1990s. The main findings indicate that the returns to education have increased,particularly after joining the European Union in 1986. Since this occurred along with anincrease in the level of...

We estimate the impact of schooling and capital constraints at the time of startup on the performance of Dutch entrepreneurial ventures, taking into account the potential endogeneity and interdependence of these variables. Instrumental variable estimates indicate that a 1 percentage point...

This paper estimates the health returns to education, using data on identical twins. I adopt a twin-differences strategy in order to obtain estimates that are not biased by unobserved family background and genetic traits that may affect both education and health. I further investigate to what...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

In the Netherlands auditors can be trained in a part-time educational track in which students combine working and studying or in a full-time educational track. The former training is relatively firm-specific whereas the latter training is relatively general. Applying human capital theory, we...

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs, until lay-off occurs, when this selection process starts over from scratch. We develop a simple methodology to test these predictions. Our inference uses two sources of...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education. We replicate the original study on US men and extend to US women, UK men and German men. Most original results are not robust. A college education cannot universally be considered an...

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to...