Risks and Returns to Educational Fields: A Financial Asset Approach to Vocational and Academic Education

Daniela Glocker and Johanna Storck ()

No 1240, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Applying a financial assets approach, we analyze the returns and earnings risk of investments into different types of human capital. Even though the returns from investing in human capital are extensively studied, little is known about the properties of the returns to different types of human capital within a given educational path. Using information from the German Micro Census, we estimate the risk and returns to around 70 fields of education and differentiate between vocational and academic education. We identify fields of education that are efficient investment goods, i.e. high returns at a given level of risk, and fields that are chosen for other (non-monetary) reasons. Furthermore, we rank fields of education by their return per unit of risk and find that university education is not always superior to other educational paths.

Keywords: Educational choice; human capital investment; returns to schooling; mean-variance analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 368 p.
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.407561.de/dp1240.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Risks and returns to educational fields – A financial asset approach to vocational and academic education (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1240

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().