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This paper investigates the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths after compulsory education. We distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path with loops through both systems. To study the labour market outcome we compare earnings and calculate net return rates as well as risk measures to investigate whether different educational paths are characterised by different risk-return trade-offs. We use Lazear’s jack-of-all-trades theory on entrepreneurship to derive testable predictions about the labour market outcome of different combinations of education for entrepreneurs and employees. Our empirical results are based on the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) and demonstrate that mixed educational paths are well rewarded in the labour market. However, a high return is also associated with a high income variance which is driven by those who end up as entrepreneurs.

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We use a unique data set about the future wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex-ante, suggesting that students use very little private information about their wage prospects. Expectations appear much more anchored to perceptions of actual contemporaneous market data. Students even anticipate that the market provides compensation for risk, as has been established with Risk Augmented Mincer earnings equations estimated on market data: higher wage risk for educational groups is associated with higher mean wages. With observations on risk as expected by students we find compensation at similar elasticities as observed in market data. The results are robust to different specifications and estimation models.

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We empirically investigate the joint training decisions of workers and firms. The aim of our study is to learn how various cost components affect workers' (non-)participation in training. In particular, we separately consider monetary and non-monetary training costs, which is possible thanks to an especially rich dataset that includes both participants and non-participants. Our estimation results show that workers whose firms cover some of their training costs would generally be more likely to have assumed the full training costs themselves had they not received employer support. Moreover, the share of self-financed training, as compared to employer-supported training, is generally low. Thus, firms moderate virtually all training decisions and, as a result, considerably influence (non-)participation patterns. Interestingly, although training non-participation can be attributed to both monetary and non-monetary costs, the latter seem to comprise the more binding restriction. That is, time is more costly than money.

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The transition from school-to-work has been a burning issue in most countries for the last decades. So far research on this topic has not been conclusive, and it is still not clear whether transition problems are just individual, linked to the type of education followed at uppersecondary level, or just a prolongation of problems arising from poor school performance during compulsory education. This paper uses a unique Swiss longitudinal data-set, which includes information on PISA 2000 scores and the pathways chosen after completing compulsory school. Descriptive results show that students in vocational training, who obtained lower PISA results, are significantly more likely to be in an inadequate employment situation two years after finishing vocational training. Further analysis shows, however, that it is the type of vocational training followed at upper-secondary level that is decisive for the success in the transition. Nevertheless, individual PISA scores have an indirect impact on the transition results, as they are an important factor explaining which pupils are more likely to get into an intellectually demanding vocational training and which ones are not.

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Apprenticeship training in Germany is generally considered to be an investment of companies into the human capital of their apprentices. This view is mainly based on the German cost benefit studies which testify training firms high net costs for their apprenticeships, but these results have not been reconfirmed by other types of data or methods. We show that motivations for apprenticeship training are not homogeneous: some firms follow an investment strategy and others follow a substitution strategy. We derive an empirical method to identify different training strategies which can be used with publicly available company data. According to our classification, we find that in Germany 18.5 per cent of all companies follow a substitution strategy and 43.75 per cent to follow an investment strategy; the rest is mixed or undetermined. In a second step we estimate the determinants for a substitution strategy. We find sizeable differences between sectors with different skill requirements and between firms' coverage of industrial relations.

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Small average wage effects of employer and/or occupation changes after apprenticeship training mask large differences between occupation groups and apprentices with different schooling backgrounds. Apprentices in commerce and trading occupations strongly profit from an employer change. Employer and occupation changers in industrial occupations face large wage disadvantages, however. We are the first to analyse these differences while those quality differences between training firms that have been widely studied before are small. This paper also explains differences between previous findings by comparing their empirical estimation strategies. It demonstrates that selectivity into occupations and changes, unobserved heterogeneity between occupations, and sample selection matter. Finally, it proposes several improvements in the estimation technique to measure apprenticeship quality.

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The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effects of job training programs, as part of the special training contracts prompted by the Moroccan government, on the performances of Moroccan firms. Using firm-level panel data, we highlight that special training contracts are an efficient measure of public policy. Indeed, job training programs increase the competitiveness and the performances of Moroccan firms. Besides, these effects are even better when the implementation of training by Moroccan firms is part of a real strategy of human resources development. On the contrary, when firms consider the public policy only as a financing opportunity, they are severely sanctioned.

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This study is based on data of a cohort of Swiss firms that were founded in 1996/97. In the year 2000 data were collected by means of a postal survey among those firms, which still existed by that time. In 2003 and 2006 two further surveys were conducted among the participants of the respective last study. In this study we analysed, firstly, the determinants of the propensity to train apprentices of new firms and how they change with increasing firm age. Secondly, we investigated how a firm's training propensity correlated with its labour productivity. To this end, we specified an equation for training propensity and an equation for labour productivity, which included as an additional production factor the endogenized propensity to train apprentices.

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Research on determining what it is about schooling that the labour market rewards is scarce. This paper shows that when specially controlling for schooling cognitive skills (that is, the capacity to process information and apply knowledge) and not cognitive skills as a whole, a considerable share of the return to schooling is constituted of cognitive skills. This contrasts with previous research that strongly favored noncognitive skills (that is, behavioral and personality traits) as the key component of the return to schooling. Results show schools are a place where one acquires, or is sorted, on a knowledge and a behavioral criteria in similar shares. Findings also suggest that cognitive skills acquired in school are considerably more likely to be rewarded than their non-schooling counterpart. This effect may be attributed to the signalling value of schooling. Such conclusions give weight to current policies that employ cognitive skill tests to asses schooling quality.

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Previous research on educational decisions has almost exclusively focused on individual decisions to start a particular education. At the same time, the decision to revise an educational choice has hardly been analysed, unless it is the decision to drop out. However, dropping out is only one possibility of revising an educational choice. In this paper, we distinguish three different educational revisions, namely, dropping out, changing and upgrading. We analyse the determinants of these three different choices in apprenticeship training using hazard rate models for the empirical analysis. In a first research step, we carry out a simple hazard rate estimation of the decision to drop out versus staying in the educational system because dropping out is associated with considerable risks, unlike the other two choices. Our most important finding here is that dropout decisions seem to be driven to a considerable amount by financial considerations such as the opportunity cost of apprenticeship training or financial distress, determinants that could rarely be analysed in previous research due to lack of information. In a competing risks specification of the different educational choices, we find additional regional-level impact factors and remarkable differences in the determinants of the different choices. Less favorable local labor market conditions lead to lower hazards of staying within the educational system. These results underline the importance of distinguishing between the different choices instead of focusing exclusively on dropping out as one possible choice.

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