This paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training in Romania, a country which experienced major technological and institutional change during its transition from Communism to a market economy. To avoid the bias caused by non-random selection, we exploit a...

Youth unemployment in Latin America is exceptionally high, as much as 50% among the poor. Vocational training may be the best chance to help unemployed young people at the bottom of the income distribution. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth...

This paper studies the relationships between on-the-job training, wages and job performance by using the personnel records of a large manufacturing firm. Utilizing a company database avoids the biases that generally result when individuals are unable to accurately recall the amount of training...

This paper develops a model of skill formation that explains a variety of findings established in the child development and child intervention literatures. At its core is a technology that is stage-specific and that features self productivity, dynamic complementarity and skill multipliers....

This chapter considers means-tested employment and training programs in the United States. We focus in particular on large, means-tested federal programs, including the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), its successor the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), that program's recent replacement, the...

We use administrative data and a randomization design to examine the long-term educational impacts of a large-scale vocational training program for disadvantaged youth in Colombia on trainees and their relatives. Up to eleven years after randomization, trainees were more likely to enroll in...

We study the interaction between job and soft skills training on expectations and labor market outcomes in the context of a youth training program in the Dominican Republic. Program applicants were randomly assigned to one of 3 modalities: a full treatment consisting of hard and soft skills...

Firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. “Training contracts” that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. Using plausibly exogenous contractual variation from a leading trucking firm,...

This paper examines the role of international trade for job polarization– the decline in opportunities for mid-wage workers while those for high- and low-wage workers increase. With employer-employee matched data on virtually all workers and firms in Denmark between 1999 and 2009, we show that...

Occupational licensure, one of the most significant labor market regulations in the United States, may restrict the interstate movement of workers. We analyze the interstate migration of 22 licensed occupations. Using an empirical strategy that controls for unobservable characteristics that...