The Educational Asset Market: A Finance Perspective on Human Capital Investment

Abstract

Like the stock market, the human capital market consists of a wide range of assets, i.e. educations. Each young individual chooses the educational asset that matches his preferred combination of risk and return in terms of future income. A unique register-based data set with exact information on type and level of education enables us to focus on the shared features between human capital and stock investments. An innovative finance-labor approach is applied to study the educational asset market. A risk-return trade-off is revealed which is not directly related to the length of education.Efficient Frontier; Human Capital Investment; Mean-Variance; Performance Measures.