We examine how different student employment statuses during tertiary education affect short-term and medium-term labor market returns. We focus on differences between students studying full-time and students studying and working part-time, i.e., ‘earning while learning’. In addition, we...

Using the Swiss Graduate Survey, we study how the type of tertiary education an individual chooses (i.e., vocational or academic) influences career entry and labor market success after graduation. Our results show that vocational graduates face less risky career entry than academic graduates....

According to standard human capital theory, firm-financed training cannot be explained if the skills obtained are general in nature. Nevertheless, in German-speaking countries, firms invest heavily in apprenticeship training although the skills are assumed to be general. In our paper, we study...

Mobility and flexibility is increasingly demanded as structural change challenges estab-lished educational systems and traditional occupational demarcations. We use Lazear’s skill-weights approach (2003) first to operationalize the degree of specificity of skill com-binations in an innovative...

According to standard human capital theory firm financed training cannot be explained if skills are of general nature. Nevertheless, investments of firms into general training can be observed and there has been a large literature to explain this puzzle, mostly referring to imperfect labor market...