The effects of training on own and co-worker productivity: evidence from a field experiment

This paper analyses the effects of work-related training on worker productivity. Toidentify the causal effects from training, we combine a field experiment that randomlyassigns workers to treatment and control groups with panel data on individual workerperformance before and after training. We find that participation in the trainingprogramme leads to a 10 percent increase in performance. Moreover, we provideexperimental evidence for externalities from treated workers on their untreatedteammates: An increase of 10 percentage points in the share of treated peers leads to aperformance increase of 0.51 percent. We provide evidence that the estimated effectsare causal and not the result of employee selection into and out of training. Furthermore,we find that the performance increase is not due to lower quality provided by the worker.