Exploiting variation in welfare reform across states and over time and using relevant comparison groups, this study estimates the effects of welfare reform on an important source of human capital acquisition among women at risk for relying on welfare: vocational education and training. The...

Various theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs throughout the world. Using data from the largest randomized control trial ever conducted on entrepreneurship training, we examine the validity of such motivations and find that...

This paper examines the degree to which the learning by doing externality [LBD] calls for an undervalued exchange rate, a policy suggested by recent empirical studies which concluded that mildly undervalued real exchange rate may enhance growth. We obtain mixed results. For an economy where LBD...

We develop a fairly general and tractable model of investment when workers can invest in multiple skills and different jobs put different weights on those skills. In addition to expected findings such as that younger workers are more likely than older workers to respond to a demand shock by...

Firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. “Training contracts” that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. Using plausibly exogenous contractual variation from a leading trucking firm,...

Combining weekly productivity data with weekly productivity beliefs for a large sample of truckers over two years, we show that workers tend to systematically and persistently over-predict their productivity. If workers are overconfident about their own productivity at the current firm relative...

We investigate learning at the workplace. To do so, we use German administrative data that contain information on the entire workforce of a sample of establishments. We document that having more highly paid coworkers is strongly associated with future wage growth, particularly if those workers...

While a burgeoning literature has extolled the conceptual virtues of directly measuring the underlying job tasks that define work activities, in practice task-based approaches have been hampered by well-known data limitations. We study wage determination using data collected specifically to...

We study the effects of on-the-job skill accumulation on average hours worked by age and the volatility of hours over the life cycle in a calibrated general equilibrium model. Two forms of skill accumulation are considered: learning by doing and on-the-job training. In our economy with learning...

This paper summarizes the findings from the first randomized evaluation of a job training program in Latin America. Between 2001 and 2005 the government of the Dominican Republic operated a subsidized training program for low-income youth in urban areas. The program featured several weeks of...