Lifelong learning is often promoted in aging societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation trying to explain individual time-to-degree variances with business cycle fluctuations. Assuming that students determine the optimum study length at university weighing up the cost of an additional semester against the consumption...

Purpose – The paper aims to test whether a firm's provision of training depends on the intake quality of trainees. While a firm may just treat each trainee equally, independent of his or her intake quality, firms may alternatively also provide more training to less able individuals or focus on...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to simulate the potential costs and benefits for Spanish firms providing dual apprenticeship training. Design/methodology/approach The paper conducts simulations of ten training occupations in six different industries in Spain. For these simulations, the...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare a firm’s net cost and post-apprenticeship benefits of providing apprenticeship training in Austria and Switzerland: two countries with many similarities but some critical institutional differences. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw...

Summary In many countries on the European continent, it is feared that public funding of tertiary education (university and non-university) leads to an undesirable redistribution of income “from the bottom up”. The calculation of private rates of return is one way of answering this and other...

Summary Attempts to liberalize shopping hours often fail because of the resistance and arguments of retail sector employees who fear that this would cause their working conditions to deteriorate. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that compared the willingness of sales...

Labour market expectations and especially wage expectations are important determinants for individual schooling decisions. However, research on individual expectations of students is scarce. The paper presents the Swiss results of a survey that was conducted in ten European countries. Its main...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths – all leading to a tertiary educational degree. The paper seeks to distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path...