Schooling and regional factors as determinants of employees' participation in further education

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Katja Görlitz; Dr. Marcus Tamm
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2012 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 215882423

A large number of empirical studies have documented the impact of individual and firm-specific characteristics on employees' participation in training. However, whether factors that vary between regions have an influence as well, is largely unexplored until now. We consider several regional factors that potentially determine training participation, e.g. firm competition, the availability of training subsidies as well as the regional supply of training. In doing so, we pay specific attention to heterogeneous effects by level of schooling. The latter is of high political interest since large differences in training participation prevail between individuals with high and low schooling, but the underlying mechanisms driving the training gap are not yet well understood. Furthermore, we will estimate the returns to training and test for heterogeneity in returns by level of schooling. In addition to monetary returns, e.g. by means of wage increases, we will consider several non-monetary returns, e.g. with respect to job mobility or job satisfaction. In addition, we will explore several methodological aspects: Is item nonresponse for wages selective? How large is the difference between employment information and wages reported in telephone interviews and those recorded in administrative data? Answering these methodological questions is a necessary prerequisite before being able to sensibly analyze wage returns to training.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1646: Education as a Lifelong Process. Analysing Data of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)
• Participating Persons: Dr. Jörg Drechsler; Professorin Dr. Aderonke Osikominu