Avoiding labor shortages for skilled employees is one of the major challenges for highly competitive firms acting in tight labor markets. The ability to avoid labor shortages on the company level, for example measured by the share of vacant jobs, is distributed very unevenly and cannot in...

Although participation in continuing vocational training is often found to be associated with considerable individual benefits, a puzzlingly large number of people still do not take part in training. We argue that in order to solve the puzzle it is important to take selection effects into...

In a recent paper Ed Lazear (2004) proposed the so called skill-weights view of firm-specific human capital. According to his theory all single skills are general but each firm may require a different combination of these single skills. The purpose of our paper is to test Lazear`s model using a...

Avoiding labor shortages for skilled employees is one of the major challenges for highly competitive firms acting in tight labor markets. The ability to avoid labor shortages on the company level, for example measured by the share of vacant jobs, is distributed very unevenly and cannot in...

Although participation in continuing vocational training is often found to be associated with considerable individual benefits, a puzzlingly large number of people still do not take part in training. We argue that in order to solve the puzzle it is important to take selection effects into...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the magnitude and the determinants of a firm's costs to fill a vacancy. We establish empirical facts about hiring costs based on representative establishment-level data from Switzerland. In 2009, average costs to fill a vacancy for a skilled worker...

Mobility and flexibility is increasingly demanded as structural change challenges estab-lished educational systems and traditional occupational demarcations. We use Lazear’s skill-weights approach (2003) first to operationalize the degree of specificity of skill com-binations in an innovative...

The paper assess the potential free-riding of non-training firms on the training efforts of training firms and analyses differences in recruitment of apprenticeship graduates trained elsewhere between training and non-training firms. The paper shows that only 5.6 per cent of non-training firms...

This paper analyses the effects of work-related training on worker productivity. To identify the causal effects from training, we combine a field experiment that randomly assigns workers to treatment and control groups with panel data on individual worker performance before and after training....