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The article describes the various features of work and leisure and the difficulties of recovering preferences for these features from market data. It examines the views of classical economists on work, its pain and its rewards. Moreover, it discusses the impact of the economic and social context in which work is performed on individual attitudes toward work. Labor economics is analyzed from the broader perspective of outsiders. Tools have been developed by modern labor economists to measure the impact of training and work programs that provide incentives to augment human capital and increase market work.

In this article, we discuss forms of migration that are non-permanent. We focus on temporary migrations where the decision to return is taken by the immigrant. These migrations are likely to be frequent, and we provide some evidence for the UK. We then develop a simple model that rationalizes the decision of a migrant to return to his/her home country, despite a persistently higher wage in the host country. We consider three motives for a temporary migration: (i) differences in relative prices between host and home country, (ii) complementarities between consumption and the location where consumption takes place, and (iii) the possibility of accumulating human capital abroad, which enhances the immigrant's earnings potential back home. For the last return motive, we discuss extensions that allow for immigrant heterogeneity, and develop implications for selective in- and out-migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wealth of a nation is greatly influenced by the quality of its labor force and this in turn depends upon the propensity of each individual to make the best use of his abilities and to improve himself through learning. To induce changes in these individual investment decisions is a basic target of economic policy. In this article the author examines the educational and occupational choices of graduate students in the natural and social sciences. Working hypothesis is that in making these choices, students attempt to maximize the present value of lifetime earnings. The main purpose is to test whether this hypothesis is, in fact, consistent with the actual choices of scientists. The first part of the article restates briefly the conventional theory of investment in human capital and its empirical implications in a certain world with perfect capital markets. The second part derives estimates of wage functions in different scientific fields. These estimates are then utilized to calculate rates of return and the life time earning streams which are associated with different types and levels of graduate education. The last part of the paper is an attempt to relate the observed choices of graduate students to lifetime earning differentials across fields.

The study contains estimates of the coefficients of variation of income of scientists by age, level of education, and type of employment. The source of data is the 1966 National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel. The analysis shows that the coefficient of variation tends to decrease as the level of education increases, and to be higher in private industry than in government or educational institutions. Incomes of scientists are found to be lognormally distributed. Estimates of the rate of return to education, which take into account risk differentials, are derived. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the riskiness of the various occupational and educational alternatives of scientists in the United States, and proposes a simple method of incorporating the risk element into the conventional theory of human capital. The empirical evidence summarized in this paper indicates the existence of systematic risk differentials among scientists of different occupational and educational backgrounds. In particular, the coefficient of variation tends to decrease (even though the variance itself is increasing) with the level of education, and to be higher in private industry than in other types of employment. The importance of the observed risk differentials relative to the standard (mean) earnings differentials depends upon the nature of the utility function and the degree of risk aversion. Under "reasonable" degrees of risk aversion, risk differentials were found to be relatively unimportant. On the other hand, changes in risk aversion affected the rates of return from education considerably. It is the inclusion of risk aversion rather than the inclusion of risk which forces us to modify the conventional estimates of rates of return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent survey there is an attempt by J. Mincer to construct a theory of income distribution based on the theory of human capital. An important link in the argument is that, given the same opportunities in the capital market, an individual of higher ability will acquire more schooling than a less able individual. Mincer views the rate of return from investment in human capital as an index of ability. Higher ability entails a higher marginal rate of return function and thus, other things equal, a higher rate of investment. It is well known that this approach is quite arbitrary. Depending on the relation which is stipulated between ability and earning capacity, there may be any relation between ability and the optimal level of schooling. More generally, the relation between ability and education is a "reduced form" relation; its precise nature will depend on the form of the "structural" relations in the individual's maximization problem. The purpose of this note is to present a simple framework in which this dependence may be analyzed.