Chapter 11 The determination of life cycle earnings: A survey The chapter presents a survey on the determination of life cycle earnings. The chapter describes the theoretical work on the determination of life cycle earnings. The common thread in this work is the notion that workers can influence their earnings through various investment activities. A person who spends time in school or in on the job training sacrifices current earnings in the hope of increasing his future earning potential. Consequently the observed life cycle earnings profiles reflect individual economic choices as well as purely technological or biological processes such as depreciation or aging. There is however considerable controversy on the market situation in which investment choices are made. The welfare and policy implications are very different if schooling enhances productivity or is merely used as a mode of transferring income by signalling and screening. In this survey focus is on the human capital approach and on its testable implications to individual earning profiles setting aside the aggregate and policy implications. There are various stylized facts that the theory attempts to explain: a life cycle earnings profile which is increasing at early ages and is declining toward the end of the working period; a wage profile that tends to increase over the life cycle with a weak tendency for wage reduction toward the end of the working period; an hours of work life cycle profile which is increasing at early ages and declining at older ages with the peak occurring earlier than in the earnings or wage profiles.