In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to education. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to education. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West...

Empirical work on the wage impact of training has noted that unobserved heterogeneity of training participants should play a role. The expected return to training, which partly depends on unobservable characteristics, is likely to be a crucial criterion in the decision to take part in training...

This paper deals with the labor market entrance of young people in the Federal Republic of Germany. The main focus is on failures during this stage. First, an overview of the youth labor market in Germany is given. Then, the transition from vocational training to work is analyzed: The duration...

We propose a simple way to improve the efficiency of the average treatment effect on propensity score based estimators. As the weights become arbitrarily large for the propensity scores being close to one or zero, we propose to shrink the propensity scores away from these boundaries. Using a...

This paper focuses on the causal effect of overqualification on earnings. Although the issue of overqualification has recently been addressed by quite a huge body of literature there are only few studies examining the causal effect of overqualification on earnings in the sense of Rubins...