IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iso/educat/0031.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Risk-Return Trade-Offs to Complete Educational Paths: Vocational, Academic and Mixed

Author

Listed:
  • Simone Tuor

    (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich)

  • Uschi Backes-Gellner

    (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich)

Abstract

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 labor market outcome we compare earnings and calculate net return rates as well as risk measures to investigate whether different educational paths are characterized 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 labor market. However, a high return is also associated with a high income variance which is driven by those who end up as entrepreneurs.

Suggested Citation

  • Simone Tuor & Uschi Backes-Gellner, 2008. "Risk-Return Trade-Offs to Complete Educational Paths: Vocational, Academic and Mixed," Economics of Education Working Paper Series 0031, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).
    • Handle: RePEc:iso:educat:0031
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0031_lhwpaper.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Regula Geel & Uschi Backes-Gellner, 2010. "Earning While Learning: Labor Market Returns to Student Employment During Tertiary Education," Economics of Education Working Paper Series 0049, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).
    2. Polona Domadenik & Dasa Farcnik, 2011. "Did Bologna reform improve school-to-work transition of graduates? Evidence from Slovenia," Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación volume 6, in: Antonio Caparrós Ruiz (ed.), Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación 6, edition 1, volume 6, chapter 40, pages 649-665, Asociación de Economía de la Educación.
    3. Uschi Backes-Gellner & Johannes Mure, 2008. "The Swiss Leading House on Economics of Education, Firm Behaviour and Training Policies," Economics of Education Working Paper Series 0014, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    risk-return trade-off; complete educational paths; occupational choice;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • M53 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Training

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iso:educat:0031. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sara Brunner (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/isuzhch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.