Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/239374 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Risk and Financial Management [ISSN:] 1911-8074 [Volume:] 13 [Issue:] 11 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2020 [Pages:] 1-25
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
In the traditional human capital framework, education is often considered as an investment, rather than consumption, while consumption is not necessarily precluded. Whether education is an investment is empirically unclear and relatively under-explored. We shed light on this issue by estimating the risk-return trade-off in the context of education. If education is indeed an investment, risk could play an important role in individual educational decisions just as with risky assets. As portfolio theory predicts, there could be a trade-off between returns to education and risks concerning those returns: higher risks are generally associated with higher returns. We contribute to the literature by proposing various measures of risk based on the entire distribution of returns to education recovered by our nonparametric models. Our results confirm a trade-off between returns and variance. We also found statistically significant impacts for the higher moments: skewness and kurtosis. Interestingly, we found the relationship between mean returns and variance to be linear, and the relationship between expected returns and higher-moments (skewness and kurtosis) is non-linear.
Subjects: 
risk
portfolio theory
categorical regression splines
higher moments
return to education
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article

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