Training and Skill Acquisition on the Job
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2017 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Hyatt Regency Chicago, Gold Coast
- Chair: Colleen F. Manchester, University of Minnesota
Learning Through the Lens of Your Job: Acquisition of Non-Transferable Human Capital by Employees
Abstract
This paper offers a new conceptual framework for the acquisition of human capital by proposing that employees play an active role in shaping the transferability of skills acquired. We propose that employees who are more committed (i.e., have greater psychological attachment) to their employer are more likely to acquire new skills in a way that benefits that employer, resulting in accumulation of relatively more non-transferable skills as compared to employees who are less committed to their employer. Using data from a sample of employees pursuing a part-time Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree, we measure employees' reports of non-transferability for each course taken and their commitment to their employer as measured by affective and normative commitment. We find a positive relationship between commitment and perceived non-transferability, which is largely driven by differences in the extent to which employees draw on their current employment context within their coursework. We also find that more committed employees are more likely to pursue job-related elective courses relative to those with lower commitment. Finally, acquisition of skills that are perceived as non-transferable is negatively associated with employee's intentions to quit their current employer, implying that such perceptions may influence labor market mobility.Job Changes and the Return to Seniority
Abstract
All identifying information about returns to seniority comes from loss of tenure in job changes, but these transitions have differing characteristics. This paper uses a short panel representative of the U.S. college-educated population to estimate these returns, incorporating information about the characteristics of job changes. When job changes are treated as equivalent, the estimated returns to tenure are in line with previous estimates. However, when tenure is interacted with the type oftransition, I find that loss of tenure has a large wage cost when an individual changes both employer and type of job, but average wage change is indistinguishable from zero when only the employer changes. These results imply that overall returns to tenure represent mainly the accumulation of skills that are matched to the current position and that tenure with an employer in itself has minimal return. Transitions to a different type of job cause a deterioration in the skill match and corresponding wage loss.
High School Inputs and Labor Market Outcomes over a Career: New Data and Estimates from Wisconsin
Abstract
This study presents new evidence on the relationship between high school inputs measured at the time male respondents attended high school and the earnings of these same individuals throughout their careers, when they were about 35, 52 and 64 years of age. To accomplish this task, we matched newly coded data on the characteristics of Wisconsin high schools in the 1950s to the 1/3 random sample of 1957 Wisconsin high school graduates that are included in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. Our estimates show a significant positive relationship of proxies for teacher human capital (education and experience) on student earnings that remain unchanged at all three career points. Our preferred estimates imply a $1000 difference ($2010) in teacher human capital raises earnings each year by 1.89-2.20 percent. We use our point estimates and a baseline career earnings model for male Wisconsin high school graduates constructed from the 1960-2000 Censuses to estimate the returns to communities from their investments in students. Our preferred estimates show the present value of the benefits to students from investing a $1/student for 4 years falls between $224 and $263 (all 2010 dollars) with an internal rate of return between 18 and 19 percent. We also find high school inputs have a strong effect on the assets of these students in 2004 when they are about 64 years old. We believe these results are the first estimates of the lifetime returns to school quality using individual panel data. Our estimates remain virtually unchanged using a variety of alternative specifications and samples.Discussant(s)
Jeffrey Waddoups
, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
Mitchell Hoffman
, University of Toronto
Eliza Forsythe
, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
JEL Classifications
- J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor