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We use linked data for 1,460 workplaces and 19,853 employees from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to analyse the incidence and duration of employee training in Britain. We find training to be positively associated with having a recognised vocational qualification and current union membership, whilst being non-white, [a] shorter current job tenure, and part-time or fixed-term employment statuses are all associated with less training. Furthermore, in line with recent non-competitive training models, higher levels of wage compression (measured in absolute or relative terms) are positively related to training.

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We analyse the effects of government-sponsored training for the unemployed conducted during East German transition. For the microeconometric analysis, we use a new, large and informative administrative database that allows us to use matching methods to reduce potential selection bias, to study different types of programmes, and to observe interesting labour market outcomes over eight years. We find that, generally, all training programmes under investigation increase long-term employment prospects and earnings. However, as an important exception, the longer training programmes are on average not helpful for their male participants. At least part of the explanation for this negative result is that caseworkers severely misjudged the structure of the future demand for skills.

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Using data from the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1996, the authors investigate the impact of union coverage on work-related training and how the union-training link affects wages and wage growth for a sample of full-time men. Relative to uncovered workers, union-covered men are more likely to receive training and also receive more days of training. In addition, union-covered men experience greater returns to training, and covered-trained workers face a higher wage growth. While some of these findings have been found in previous studies, others are new. The wage results, in particular, suggest a rethinking is warranted of the conventional view that union wage formation in Britain reduces the incentives to acquire work-related training.

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We develop a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model yields ambiguous predictions on the sign of this relationship. On the one hand, given the number of firms, a deregulation reduces profits per unit of output, and thereby reduces training. On the other hand, the number of firms increases, and so does the output gain from training, which facilitates the investment in training. Our numerical simulation shows that for reasonable values of the parameters a negative relationship prevails. We use repeated cross section data from the European Labour Force Survey to investigate empirically the relationship between product market regulation and training incidence in a sample of 15 European countries and 13 industrial sectors, which we follow for about 7 years. Our empirical results are unambiguous and show that an increase in product market deregulation generates a sizeable increase in training incidence.

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This paper analyses the impact of formal training on worker mobility. Using data from the Swiss Labour 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 firm-provided 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.

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We analyse the influence of regional determinants on the decision of employers to provide within-firm further training. We estimate the effects of the regional population density, the unemployment rate and the regional concentration of an industry against the background of several determinants of further training at the establishment level. To account for the clustered and longitudinal structure of our data - with annual observations of firms and firms nested within regions - we apply multi-level random effects logit models. Our empirical analysis is based on the IAB-Establishment Panel 2001 to 2007.

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Recent empirical evidence suggests that the density of local economic activity - measured as the number of employees per squared kilometer - positively affects local average productivity. In this paper we use British data from the European Community Household Panel to ask whether local density affects employer-provided training. We find that training is less frequent in economically denser areas. We explain this result as the outcome of the interaction between the positive pooling effects and negative poaching and turnover effects of agglomeration. The size of the negative effect of density is not negligible: when evaluated at the average firm size in the local area, a 10 per cent increase in density reduces the probability of employer-provided training by 0.07, more than 20 per cent of the average incidence of training in the UK during the sample period.

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Swedish labour market programs appear large from an international perspective, yet their consequences are not fully investigated and understood. In this paper we estimate a switching regression model with training effect modelled as a random coefficient, partitioned in an observed and unobserved component. We investigate labour market training for three cohorts during the 80s and the beginning of the 90s on its effect on earnings. We separate the analysis between Swedish-born and foreign-born individuals to identify differences in their responses to training. The results indicate that there is positive sorting into training. We find that the proportion of trainees having positive rewards from training was not very different from the proportion having negative rewards. This means that the results do not support the view that from efficiency considerations, too few persons were enrolled in labour market training during this period. Differences in results across cohorts can be interpreted as being caused by rapid changes in the labour market. Further, consistent with results from several previous studies, we find that being young often means no positive pay-off from training, and the same is found for persons with only primary education. In conflict with what earlier studies have shown, we found that males have a better pay-off from training than females. Rewards from training were higher for foreign-born than for natives and rewards among the former vary by place of birth.

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A small number of recent empirical studies for several countries has reported the intriguing finding that the ‘advantage’ previously enjoyed by men in respect of training incidence and reported in earlier work in the literature has been reversed. The present paper explores the sources of the gender differential in training incidence using Labour Force Survey data, updating previous U.K. studies and providing further insights into the above phenomenon. The results suggest that the greater part of the ‘gap’ typically relates to differences in characteristics, among which the most important relate to occupation, industry and sector (public/private).

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This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that early disadvantages produce severe later disadvantages that are hard to remedy. We also show that cognitive ability is not the only determinant of education, labor market outcomes and pathological behavior like crime. Abilities differ in their malleability over the life-cycle, with noncognitive skills being more malleable at later ages. This has important implications for the design of policy. The gaps in skills and abilities open up early, and schooling merely widens them. Additional university tuition subsidies or improvements in school quality are not warranted by Scottish evidence. Company-sponsored job training yields a higher return for the most able and so this form of investment will exacerbate the gaps it is intended to close. For the same reason, public job training is not likely to help adult workers whose skills are rendered obsolete by skill-biased technological change. Targeted early interventions, however, have proven to be very effective in compensating for the effect of neglect.

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