What Happens To The Effects Of Government-Funded Training Programs Over Time?

This paper applies meta-analytic techniques to evaluations of voluntary training programs to investigate whether impacts of government-funded training programs on earnings grow or deteriorate over time. For adult men and youth, we find some evidence that, after initially increasing, earnings impacts diminish over time. For adult women, in contrast, the evidence suggests that earnings impacts initially grow and then remain undiminished. Given the scarcity of impact estimates for more than three years, we recommend that future studies measure these impacts for a longer period of time. Until this is done, cost-effectiveness assessments of training programs should allow for the possibility that, at least for adult women, earnings impacts might remain stable over time.