Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Job-Related Training: Macroeconomic Evidence from OECD Countries

This paper presents an empirical analysis on the macroeconomic determinants of aggregate job-related training activity across fourteen OECD countries. Training data comes from the International Adult Literacy Survey. We find that compression at the bottom of the wage distribution has a positive effect on aggregate training across countries and age-groups while compression at the top has the opposite effect. Consistent with microeconomic evidence on education and training, average literacy skills in each country and age-group have a positive effect on the proportion of workers trained. The analysis controls for unemployment rates, R&D levels, unionization rates, and industrial structures.