We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete-choice, finite-horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross-country differences in the relative success of players. While we find...

Secondary schools in the developed world differ in the degree of differentiation and in the first age of selection of pupils into different tracks. In this paper, we account for the heterogeneity of tracking time with a simple stochastic model which conjugates the returns from specialization...

"There is substantial cross-country variation in secondary school design, with some countries tracking students into different ability schools very early, and other countries with little or no tracking at all. Does tracking length affects school performance, as measured by standardized test...

During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the efficiency costs, if any, of de-tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills - two jobs model with a frictional labour market,...

This paper investigates the relationship between education and training provided by the firm, both on the job and off the job, using a unique dataset based on a survey of Thai employees conducted in the summer of 2001. We find a significant and negative relationship between educational...

This paper uses a unique survey of the Chinese youth to construct a panel data in which we keep track of geographical and job mobilities. Our estimation results deliver the following major findings. (1) The sample individuals are highly mobile. Job quits and relocations are frequent and they are...

The existing empirical evidence on the relationship between apprenticeships, initial workplace training and economic downturns, is relatively scarce. The bottom line of this literature is that ratio of apprentices to employees tends to be (mildly) pro-cyclical and to decline during a recession,...

Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education...

This paper is an empirical investigation of the complementarity between education and training in 13 European countries, based on the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). After confirming the standard result that training incidence is higher among individuals with more education, I find...