We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We...

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 education...

Using a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions, we investigate the relationship between subjective discount rates and the labor market ability (the discount rate bias) on a panel taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Given household human capital and Armed Forces...

In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study,...

This paper analyzes the effects of language practice on earnings among adult male immigrants in Canada using the 1991 Census. Earnings are shown to increase with schooling, pre-immigration experience and duration in Canada, as well as with proficiency in the official languages (English and...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. To...

The standard human-capital model is based on the assumption that the observed wage of an individual is equal to the monetary value of the individual net human-capital productivity, the so-called net potential wage. We argue that this assumption is rejected by the ECHP data for Belgium, Denmark...

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

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...

An individual?s human capital has a strong influence on earnings. Yet individual, worker-level estimations of earnings rarely include the characteristics of co-workers or detailed firm-level controls. In this paper, we use a unique matched worker?workplace dataset to estimate the effect on own...