Two to Tango: The Determinants of Workers’ and FIrms’ Willingness to Participate in Job-Related Training

Abstract

This paper estimates the determinants of workers’ and firms’ willingness to train. While previous studies imposed assumptions on firms’ ability to force workers into training, I show that such assumptions are unnecessary for identification, are rejected by the data, and lead to biased estimates. I find that different training rates between workers with various levels of education are mainly due to differences in workers’ willingness to participate in training. Different training rates across age are primarily driven by differences in firms’ willingness to train certain groups. These results give clues about the successfulness of policies aimed at increasing training participation.Two to tango: the determinants of workers’ and firms’ willingness to participate in job-related training