In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, policymakers have been increasingly striving to support female entrepreneurship as a possible growth driver. This paper contributes to reconciling mixed findings in the literature on the effectiveness of entrepreneurial training with an analysis...

Thurow's job-competition model implies that overeducation is contingent upon the differing skill endowments of employees. As yet, only rudimentary evidence has been furnished to confirm this relationship. In the present paper, we test the theory in a more sophisticated manner, by means of a more...

This paper analyzes the tendency of people to choose default options when offered courses to acquire job related skills. We ask a random sample of Dutch people aged 6-80 which three skills are most important in their (future or past) jobs. Further on in the survey, we randomly select one of the...

How many immigrants with less than university education, for a given immigration quota, maximise economic output? The answer is zero in the canonical model of the labour market, where the marginal product of a university-educated immigrant is always higher. We build an alternative model in which...

This paper provides more insight into the relevance of the assumption of human capital theory that the productivity of job-related training is driven by the improvement of workers' skills. We analyse the extent to which training and informal learning on the job are related to employee skill...

Two common hypotheses regarding the relative benefits of vocational versus general education are (1) that vocational skills enhance relative short-term earnings and (2) that general skills enhance relative long-term earnings. Empirical evidence for these hypotheses has remained limited. Based on...

Building on Lazear's skill weights approach, we study the effect of having more or less heterogeneity in the training curriculum on supply of and demand for apprenticeship training. Modernizations of training curricula provide us with a quasi‐experimental setting as these modernizations can be...

In this paper I discuss a structural problem facing the United States with respect to our policy responses in the context of trade and technological change and their impact on workers. Both trade and technological change have put enormous pressure on the U.S. economy to raise the skill level of...

This paper investigates the sources of wage growth over the life cycle, where individuals have the possibility to acquire vocational training at the start of their career. Wage growth is determined by sectoral and firm mobility, unobserved ability and the accumulation of human capital. Workers...

We provide the first estimates of the impact of managers' risk preferences on their training allocation decisions. Our conceptual framework links managers' risk preferences to firms' training decisions through the bonuses they expect to receive. Risk-averse managers are expected to select...