It is a widely-held conviction that, in order to earn a decent living, one needs a good education. However, the importance of education as a determinant of earnings is far from constant: it differs strongly between countries, and also between industrial sectors within countries. Little progress has been made towards explaining these differences, partly due to the small number of cases available to test explanations. This study tackles this problem by pooling employee data from 11 capitalist countries, and focussing on differences in the sectoral context of wage determination. Depending on this context, employers may differ in their vulnerability to the effects of poor employee performance. Could sectoral differences in the impact of education be understood in terms of strategies used by especially vulnerable employers to safeguard the quality of worker performance? And might differences between countries then result, at least in part, from substantial differences in the distribution of the relevant context characteristics? These questions are analysed using a multi-level research design in which the impact of sectoral context variables on the education/wage relation at both the sector and country levels is examined.