Purpose -This paper investigates the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths -all leading to a tertiary educational degree. We distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path with loops through both systems.Design/methodology/approach -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 additionally separate entrepreneurs from employees in order to examine whether for the same combination of education the labour market outcomes differ between the two groups.Findings -The 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, for entrepreneurs a high return is also associated with a high income variance.Research limitations/implications -Our findings provide evidence for the existence of complementarities between vocational and academic education. Further research on mixed educational paths might provide more insight into this presumed relationship.Practical implications -Since the results indicate that mixed educational paths are a worthwhile strategy, the permeability of a national education system is a very important educational policy issue.Originality/value -The study is innovative in three ways: first, it focuses on complete educational paths and not just the highest educational degree. Second, an alternative measure, the Baldwin rate of return, is used to assess the profitability attached to different educational paths. Third, we calculate the income risk associated with each educational path.

This paper examines whether individuals who become either entrepreneurs or employees follow systematically different educational paths to a given educational level. Following Lazear's jack-of-all-trades theory, we expect that entrepreneurs aim at a balanced set of different skills-that is, they combine academic and vocational skills-while employees specialize in one skill. This means that entrepreneurs follow educational paths that combine different types of education, while employees follow same-type paths while climbing up the educational ladder. We use the Swiss Labor Force Survey to test our hypothesis. Our empirical findings are in line with Lazear's theory and indicate that individuals who change between different types of education and acquire a more balanced set of skills are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Thus, the permeability of a country-specific educational system is one crucial determinant of entrepreneurship.

Reversing the original signaling model, this study explains how employers signal the non-observable quality of their workplace and thereby reduce labor shortages. Based on a company data set of 204 German firms, the authors find, as predicted by their theory, that the existence of a works council, an apprenticeship training program, and a highquality incumbent workforce significantly improves recruitment success because they all reliably signal appealing workplaces. At the same time, frequent hiring of workers with non-matching qualifications reduces recruitment success because it signals lowquality workplaces. The authors' research reveals that certain aspects of labor relations and workplace characteristics exert a significant impact on recruitment success, which cannot be explained by conventional theoretical arguments.

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