Public services can be, and are, delivered according to a variety of different arrangements. The public sector can finance and provide a service itself, or contract with the private sector to participate in provision, or its role may be limited to regulating a private provider. In this paper we...

Since the Industrial Training Act of 1964, the UK government has adopted a variety of policies intended to redress a problem of under-investment in vocational training. In the 1960s and 1970s it attempted to regulate the training provided by firms, through a levy scheme. More recently,...

Failure in the training market may result from credit constraints and other capital market imperfections, deterring potential trainees, or labour market imperfections creating external benefits for firms. This paper presents a model of a training market affected by both problems, and examines...

Training for skills that are transferable to other firms, but for which the external labor market is imperfectly competitive, cannot be analyzed using the traditional tools of general and specific training. It is known that firms (as well as workers) have an incentive to invest in such training...

Two sources of inefficiency in the provision of on-the-job training are examined: an externality between firms which arises if there is imperfect competition between firms in the labor market, and allocation inefficiency due to asymmetry of information about the value of the trained worker. The...

This paper explores the incentives faced by employers for supplying general training of the type given to craft apprentices. An investment model is developed in which the employer's return takes the form of reduced recruitment costs for skilled labor. An empirical model is derived and fitted to...

This article investigates the hypothesis that when measures of specific human capital (such as job tenure) are included in earnings functions, there may be a sample selection bias because of job-matching effectsbecause workers with high unobserved match quality receive and accept high wage...

Information technology, like the telephone, influences market access; this paper answers the question about a reverse effect, does market access affect information technology, in particular its adoption?  Using the introduction of the telephone in Bavaria, I demonstrate with a rank, order and...

This paper analyses and quantifies the effects of trade liberalisation and skill-biased technical change, both exogenous and trade-induced, on the skill premium and real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in the Mexican manufacturing sector, using industry- and firm-level data for 1984-1990...