Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the US Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts of training on employment and earnings for adults, but not for dislocated workers. We find limited evidence of positive effects on firm characteristics for adults in one state, but clear evidence of effects on industry of employment for most groups. Our primary methodological contributions consist of (1) estimating the impacts of training on the types of firms and industries in which workers are able to get jobs after training, and (2) assessing the value of firm characteristics measured prior to training as additional conditioning information relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records