Employers’ Investment in Skills: Test of Skills Portability Argument (original) (raw)
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Journal of Education and Work, 2016
a institute of international and Social Studies, tallinn university, tallinn, Estonia; b Estonian center for applied research centar ,tallinn, Estonia ABSTRACT Ageing populations and accelerating economic change make it increasingly important to update the skill levels of populations over the whole life course. Adult education is believed to allow adults' skills to adapt continuously to constantly changing economic requirements. Both research into adult education, and discussions on lifelong learning policies have been dominated by a supply side view of the labour market (the human capital approach), which has tended to underplay the role of the demand side of the labour market. This paper aims to extend previous analyses by examining how both labour supply and demand characteristics influence participation in non-formal job-related education in countries with different skill formation systems. The paper emphasises skill use at work. The purpose is to understand better the relationship between participation in adult education and workers' skills profiles as well as the extent to which those skills are used in jobs and how this relationship differs in different countries. We used data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies and applied logistic regression analysis.
Firm-Specific Training: Consequences for Job Mobility
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper analyzes the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey, we find that on-the-job search activities and, to a smaller extent, actual job separations are significantly affected by both employer-provided and general training. Moreover, while the separation probability of searching workers is strongly affected by previous firmprovided training, no such effect shows up for non-searchers. This is consistent with the hypothesis that workers bear most of the cost of specific training.
Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Training: Evidence from OECD Countries
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This paper presents an empirical analysis on the determinants of aggregate levels of training across fourteen OECD countries. Training data comes from the 1994 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), which provides highly comparable crosscountry data on the percentage of employed individuals that received job-related training. We use a panel data structure to explain the levels of training across country and age groups from the average literacy skills of the corresponding population subset and other cross-country variables, including indicators of compression in the wage structure, the rate of unionization, the unemployment rate, the level of innovation activity and measures of industrial structure. We find that the average level of literacy skills in each age-group has a positive and highly significant effect on the proportion of workers that receive training, which is consistent with microeconomic evidence on the effect of educational attainment on the probability that workers participate in training. More importantly, our analysis provides evidence on the relation between compression in the wage distribution and training, a relation that has been at the center of the recent literature on training in imperfect labor markets. In particular, we find that compression at the bottom of the wage distribution increases training while compression at the top has the opposite effect. These effects are robust and highly significant across gender and for different age-group samples. Potential policy implications are discussed.
Mechanisms for enhancing employer investment in training: a comparative perspective
Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 2006
In recent years, the debate over reform to national vocational education and training systems has shifted from a focus on the supply-side of VET -qualifications structures, national training schemes and institutional structures -to demand for training by industry and the role of employers in increasing the skills levels of the workforce. Yet, enhancing employer demands for training has proved to be a perennial problem for governments of all political complexions in the developed world. Approaches to securing enterprise investment in training by governments form a continuum from low-level intervention to compulsion and regulation, and range from approaches which attempt to secure voluntary commitment through to legislating enterprise expenditure on training (Billet & Smith 2005). Voluntary commitment is often seen as the most desirable and self-sustaining approach, but is difficult to secure from enterprises. As a result, governments have often experimented with policies of compulsion to make employers invest in training such as training levies. However, decisions about expenditure on training ultimately depend on individual employer's interests, values and commitments. Improving and enhancing employers' perceptions of the value of training are vital to increasing the levels of expenditure. This paper discusses the range of government approaches to encouraging employers to invest in training and development that are to be found in the developed world. It argues that compulsory employer levies are rarely successful and that increasing the level of investment in training by employers is more likely to be achieved through more subtle policy mechanisms.
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The shadow value of employer-provided training
Journal of Economic Psychology, 2012
The Shadow Value of Employer-Provided Training This paper adopts an equivalent income approach to calculate the economic value of training activities for workers. Using econometric regression analysis of individual self-reported job satisfaction (JS) and data from the European Community Household Panel dataset (ECHP), the paper shows that employer-provided training exerts a positive and significant effect on JS. On average, this effect is equivalent to a 17.7% increase in labour earnings. Boes and Winkelmann's (2009) Generalized Ordered Probit for panel data is used to show that the determinants of JS as well as the equivalent income of training differ across the JS distribution.
Labour Economics, 2008
, two anonymous referees and seminar participants in Aix, Evry, Lyon (Journées AFSE), Marseille (GREQAM), Milan (Cattolica), Munich (CESifo), Orléans (T2M), Novara, Padova, Paris (CEPN, ESPE and EUREQUA), Pisa (Sant'Anna) and Tokyo (Keio) for comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. The data used in this paper are from the December 2001 release (contract 14/99).