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, we...

Why has the college wage premium risen rapidly in the United States since the 1980s, but not in European economies such as Germany? We argue that differences in employment protection can account for much of the gap. We develop a model where firms and workers make relationship-specific...

Using data from the German Socio Economic Panel, I describe the incidence, attributes, and outcomes of continuous training received by workers in Germany between 1986 and 1989. Further training is primarily a white collar phenomenon, is concentrated among the more highly educated, and in the...

Using information on time costs of training and gains in wages attributable to training I computed rates of return on training investments. The range of estimates based on several data sets generally exceeds the magnitudes of rates of return usually observed for schooling investments. It is not...

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...

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...

This paper examines the long-term and spillover effects of management interventions on firm performance. Under the Training Within Industry (TWI) program, the U.S. government provided management training to firms involved in war production between 1940 and 1945. Using a newly collected panel...

Amidst the rise of remote work, we ask: what are the effects of proximity to coworkers? We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output. We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, whose main campus has...