Training by firms in italian regional labour markets: the effects of education and unemployment

This paper analyses the determining reasons of the differences among the Italian regions in matter of investment in workers’ training. Training incidence in Italy is not homogeneous among regions, with a lower intensity in the South. Two not alternative explanations are proposed at a theoretical level and tested by econometric estimates, referring to the complementarity between education and training and to the effects of regional unemployment. Both hypotheses, as the results show, are upheld by empirical estimates, based on the European Community Households Panel. In our results educational level appear to be important as it affects the choice made by the firm of which workers to offer an opportunity of training, whereas unemployment rate and wage compression affect the decision of how many workers to train. The unemployment effect found out by this paper confirms that, as it has been pointed out by most recent developments of human capital literature, the firms incentives to pay for general training depend on the level of wage compression. Notwithstanding it represents an original result as compression in this model doesn’t depend on institutional factors, as usually assumed in the literature, but on the dependence of unskilled wage on regional unemployment.