A well-established empirical literature suggests that individual wages are persistent. Several theoretical arguments support this empirical finding. Yet, the standard approach to the estimation of schooling returns does not account for this fact. This paper investigates the consequences of...

Human capital contracts give private investors the right to share of students' future earnings in return for a financial contribution during their studies. Although still rarely used, human capital contracts could not only help to completement limited public funding for higher education but...

Human capital contracts give private investors the right to a share of students' future earnings in return for a fi nancial contribution during their studies. Although still rarely used, human capital contracts could not only help to complement limited public funding for higher education but...

Risk averse investors have to be compensated in higher expected returns when facing investments with higher risk. Education is an important investment therefore we use the results for 16 countries to test the positive relationship between return to education and the risk involved in this...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills— including literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

We examine the changes in the relative rewards to cognitive and non-cognitive skill during the time period 1992–2013. Using unique administrative data for Sweden, we document a secular increase in the returns to non-cognitive skill, which is particularly pronounced in the private sector and at...

A large literature has focused on estimating the returns to schooling and has typically done so by incorporating institutional heterogeneity in quality along merely one dimension (such as average SAT scores). Using longitudinal survey data of registrants for the GMAT exam and school level...

To study the role of talent in finance workers' pay, we exploit a special feature of the French higher education system. Wage returns to talent have been significantly higher and have risen faster since the 1980s in finance than in other sectors. Both wage returns to project size and the...

Returns to experience for U.S. workers have changed over the post-war period. This paper argues that a simple model goes a long way towards replicating these changes. The model features three well-known ingredients: (i) an aggregate production function with constant skill-biased technical change;...

We quantify firm heterogeneity in skill returns and present direct evidence of worker–firm complementarities. Within a model of firms' demand for cognitive and noncognitive attributes we show that identification depends on the availability of skill measures. Linking administrative data to test...