Fear of public speaking is very common but we know little about its economic implications. We establish public speaking aversion as an economically relevant preference using three steps. First, we use a lab and a classroom experiment to show that preferences for speaking in public vary strongly...

In this paper we focus on education as a private decision to invest in ‘human capital’ and the estimation of the rate of return to that private investment. While the literature is replete with studies that estimate the rate of return using regression methods where the estimated return is...

This paper analyzes the determinants of choosing a technical study at university level and of persistence in it. We find that - in the Netherlands - there is a low correlation between the probability of a student choosing a technical study and the probability of persistence in it. This implies...