Training and Lifetime Income
- 1 May 2006
- journal article
- Published by American Economic Association in The American Economic Review
- Vol. 96 (3), 832-846
- https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.96.3.832
Abstract
This paper challenges the notion that on-the-job training investments are quantitatively important for workers' welfare and argues that on-the-job training may not increase lifetime income by more than 1 percent. I argue that it is very difficult to reconcile the slowdown in wage growth late in a worker's career with optimizing behavior unless the technology for learning on the job is such that it generates very low gains from training. The analysis is based on a nonparametric methodology for estimating the learning technology from wage profiles; the results are arrived at by comparing the lifetime income when the worker optimally invests in his human capital to the one where he does not make any investments.Keywords
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