Continuous Training and Wages – An Empirical Analysis Using a Comparison-group Approach

Using German linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the impact of on-the-job training on wages. The applied estimation technique was fi rst introduced by Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008). The idea is to compare wages of employees who intended to participate in training but did not do so because of a random event with wages of training participants. The estimated wage returns are statistically insignifi - cant. Furthermore, the decision to participate in training is associated with sizeable selection eff ects. On average, participants have a wage advantage of more than 4% compared to non-participants.Continuous training; wage returns; selection effect

The Effect of Subsidizing Continuous Training Investments - Evidence from German Establishment Data

This paper evaluates the impact of a training voucher program on establishments' investments in further training. The voucher program that was implemented in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia increased training incentives for employees in small and medium-sized establishments by reducing training costs by 50%. The estimation is based on a quasi-experimental research design exploiting variation across time, regions and establishment size. Using establishment data, I find that the share of establishments that invest in training increased by approximately 5 percentage points. Training intensity and the educational structure of participants remained unaffected among those establishments investing in training.Continuous training, employers, training voucher, subsidies, difference-in-difference

Continuous Training, Job Satisfaction and Gender – An Empirical Analysis Using German Panel Data

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes the relationship between training and job satisfaction focusing in particular on gender diff erences. Controlling for a variety of socio-demographic, job and fi rm characteristics, we fi nd a diff erence between males and females in the correlation of training with job satisfaction which is positive for males but insignifi cant for females. This diff erence becomes even more pronounced when applying individual fi xed eff ects. To gain insights into the reasons for this diff erence, we further investigate training characteristics by gender. We fi nd that fi nancial support and career-orientation of courses only seems to matter for the job satisfaction of men but not of women.Training; job satisfaction; gender differences; fixed effects

Revisiting the Complementarity between Education and Training: The Role of Personality, Working Tasks and Firm Effects

This paper addresses the question to which extent the complementarity between education and training can be attributed to differences in observable characteristics, i.e. to individual, job and firm specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered characteristics, in particular, personality traits and tasks performed at work which are taken into account in addition to the standard individual specific determinants. Results show that tasks performed at work are strong predictors of training participation while personality traits are not. Once working tasks and other job related characteristics are controlled for, the skill gap in training participation drops considerably for off-the-job training and vanishes for on-the-job training.training, personality traits, working tasks, Oaxaca decomposition

Does Product Market Competition Decrease Employers’ Training Investments? – Evidence from German Establishment Panel Data

Using a large panel data set of German manufacturing establishments, this paper investigates the impact of competition on training incidence as well as on the number of trained workers. According to theory, one would expect a negative relationship between product market competition and firms’ incentives to invest in employees’ general skills (Gersbach and Schmutzler 2006). In our empirical analysis, product market competition is approximated by various measures of competition such as the Herfindahl Index, the number of firms at the 3-digit industry level and the price cost margin. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity across industries and establishments, there is no significant effect of competition on training. This result is robust towards different samples, model specifications and estimation techniques.Training, human capital, product market competition

Parenthood and risk preferences

This study analyzes how risk attitudes change when individuals become parents using longitudinal data for a large and representative sample of individuals. The results show that men and women experience a considerable increase in risk aversion which already starts as early as two years before becoming a parent, is largest shortly after giving birth and disappears when the child becomes older. These findings show that parenthood leads to considerable changes in individual risk attitudes over time. Thus, analyses using risk preferences as the explanatory variable for economic outcomes should be careful in interpreting the findings as causal effects

Information, financial aid and training participation: Evidence from a randomized field experiment

To increase employee participation in training activities, the German government introduced a large-scale training voucher program in 2008 that reduces training fees by half. Based on a randomized field experiment, this paper analyzes whether providing information about the existence and the conditions of the training voucher had an effect on actual training activities of employees. Because the voucher was newly introduced, only one-fourth of the eligible employees knew the voucher exists at the time of the experiment. The information intervention informed a random sample of eligible employees by telephone about the program details and conditions. The results indicate that the information significantly increased treated individuals' knowledge of the program but had no effect on voucher take-up or participation in training activities. Additional descriptive analyses suggest that the reasons for these zero effects are that the demand for self-financed training is low and that liquidity constraints do not discourage many employees from training participation.Im Jahr 2008 wurde in Deutschland das Programm Bildungsprämie eingeführt. Mit diesem Weiterbildungsgutschein, der eine 50-prozentige Erstattung der Weiterbildungskosten umfasst, sollen Erwerbstätige zu Weiterbildung angeregt werden. Anhand eines randomisierten Feldexperiments untersucht die Studie, ob ein verstärktes Bekanntmachen des Gutscheins mittels einer 'Informationsintervention' zu Änderungen im Weiterbildungsverhalten von Erwerbstätigen führt. Da der Gutschein erst kürzlich eingeführt wurde, war die Bekanntheit zum Zeitpunkt des Feldexperiments vergleichsweise gering. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Informationsintervention die Bekanntheit der Bildungsprämie signifikant erhöht hat, die Teilnahme an Weiterbildung hierdurch jedoch nicht verändert wurde. Ergänzende Analysen legen nahe, dass der fehlende Einfluss auf die Weiterbildungsteilnahme auf eine insgesamt geringe Nachfrage nach eigenfinanzierter Weiterbildung zurückzuführen ist sowie auf den Umstand, dass finanzielle Beschränkungen nur wenige Erwerbstätige von Weiterbildung abhalten und die Behebung dieser finanziellen Beschränkungen daher kaum Wirkung entfaltet

The effects of a high school curriculum reform on university enrollment and the choice of college major

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform on students’ probability to enroll at university and to choose Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) as college major. The reform that was introduced in one German state increased the degree of difficulty to graduate from high school by increasing the mandatory instruction time in the core subjects German, a foreign language, mathematics and natural sciences and by raising the graduation requirements. Based on administrative data covering all students, the empirical analysis is carried out by applying a difference- in-differences model. The results show that the reform increased university enrollment rates for both gender. With regard to choosing STEM as college major, we only find a robust positive effect for males

Evidence from a randomized field experiment

To increase employee participation in training activities, the German government introduced a large-scale training voucher program in 2008 that reduces training fees by half. Based on a randomized field experiment, this paper analyzes whether providing information about the existence and the conditions of the training voucher had an effect on actual training activities of employees. Because the voucher was newly introduced, only one-fourth of the eligible employees knew the voucher exists at the time of the experiment. The information intervention informed a random sample of eligible employees by telephone about the program details and conditions. The results indicate that the information significantly increased treated individuals’ knowledge of the program but had no effect on voucher take-up or participation in training activities. Additional descriptive analyses suggest that the reasons for these zero effects are that the demand for self-financed training is low and that liquidity constraints do not discourage many employees from training participation

Missing wages: How to test for biased estimates in wage functions?

This paper investigates how to test for nonresponse selection bias in wage functions induced by missing income information. We suggest an “easy-to-implement” approach which requires information on interviewer IDs and the interview date rather than hard-to-get interviewer characteristics