The risk of investment in schooling has largely been ignored. We mimic the investment decision facing a student and simulate risky earnings profiles in alternative options, with parameters taken from the very limited evidence. The distribution of rates of return appears positively skewed. Our...

We apply a recently proposed method to disentangle unobserved heterogeneity from risk in returns to education to data for the USA, the UK and Germany. We find that in residual wage variation, uncertainty by far dominates unobserved heterogeneity. The relation between uncertainty and level of...

In nine papers presented at the Turin Meetings to celebrate EALE's 25th anniversary, leading authors survey past developments in their research domains and discuss causes for shifts in attention paid to particular questions and issues. Inspired by these papers, this introductory article provides...