Training, Mobility, and Wages: Specific Versus General Human Capital

Abstract

This chapter considers training, mobility, and wages together in order to test whether firm-provided training contains a firm-specific component. From a human capital perspective, company training increases the productivity of a match while from an informational perspective, it improves the knowledge about the quality of a particular job match. From both points of view, training is expected to influence wages, mobility, and wage effects of mobility. Wages contain information about the productivity change or the updated knowledge through training, and so does mobility. These interrelations are used in order to empirically test whether training exhibits mainly general or specific human capital in two particular ways.

This chapter draws on Garloff and Kuckulenz (2006).