Flexible contracts and human capital investments

As suggested by human capital theory, workers with flexible contracts participate less often intraining than those with permanent contracts. We find that this is merely due to the fact thatflexworkers receive less employer–funded training, a gap they can only partly compensate for bytheir own training investments. Flexworkers particularly participate less in firm–specifictraining that is meant to keep up with new skill demands than workers with permanent contracts.However, for those who participate in employer–funded firm–specific training, a temporary contractappears to facilitate the transition to a permanent contract with the same employer. However, thisdoes not hold for participation in self–paid training. This training, which is usually generaltraining, does not help in finding a better job.