Back to work : the long-term effects of vocational training for female job returners

This paper studies how training vouchers increase the employment prospects of women with interrupted employment histories. Using the population of female job returners who receive a training voucher to participate in training courses and a randomly selected control group from German administrative data, we analyze the effectiveness of training on the employment probability, monthly earnings and job quality. The results suggest that the receipt of a training voucher translates into a higher employment probability and higher monthly earnings. We find an positive impact on the job quality, e.g. the probability to be full-time employed increases significantly. In contrast, the probability to be marginally employed decreases by 5 percentage points in the long-run. We count this as an indicator for employment stability. The investigation of effect heterogeneity reveals some interesting insights regarding the vocational degrees, and the different types of training courses. The effectiveness of vocational training increases with the provided human capital in the courses. Several robustness checks support a causal interpretation of the results and highlight the importance of vocational training for the very special sub-group of female job-returners.