Влияет ли дополнительное профессиональное обучение на зарплаты российских работников?

Abstract

Additional vocational training is an important tool for sustaining and enhancing employee productivity. The Russian labour market underwent considerable transformations in response to the quarantine measures introduced in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Concurrently, in 2019, Russia initiated mea­sures aimed at fostering additional vocational training. This article focuses on evaluating the role of additional vocational training as a determinant of wages, serving as a proxy for labour productivity. Empirical analyses were conducted using representative microdata from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS HSE) spanning the years 2019 to 2021. The impact of additional vocational training was assessed across va­rious demographic groups, including men and women, individuals with and without higher education, as well as those under 40 and over 40 years of age. To test the robustness of the findings, alternative econometric techniques, such as the least squares method, quantile regression, and the difference-in-differences method, were employed. Results from methods that do not account for individuals’ unobservable abilities indicated a positive influence of additional vocational training on wages. However, the difference-in-differences method revealed no statistically significant effect of additional vocational training on wages during the study period. These findings underscore the importance of addressing potential sources of bias in estimates and understanding data limitations, factors that are critical in selecting the appropriate econometric techniques for analysis.