This paper develops a model of optimal education choice of an agent who has an option to emigrate. Using a real options framework, we analyze the time evolution of human capital in the home country and investigate the role of migration opportunities in the accumulation of different types of...

The paper analyzes the effect of human-capital investments of heterogeneous individuals on the dynamics of the wage structure within a neoclassical growth model. The accumulation of physical capital changes relative factor prices and thus incentives to acquire skills, thereby altering the...

This paper analyses the returns to education of specific occupations in Canada. The purpose is to scrutinize whether and in how far academic and vocational education do differ in monetary benefits regarding individual returns. Therefore, two different methodologies of calculation are used to...

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

The growing finance wage premium is related to a modest net reallocation of skilled workers from non-finance sectors into finance in a broad sample of 24 countries over 35 years. The reallocation is higher when the finance wage premium grows faster than the contribution of the financial sector...