Derechos de participación, formación y eficiencia de los trabajadores: hipótesis y evidencia empírica para Alemania

This paper first develops an efficiency case for employee participation rights (EPRs) in decision making at the plant level, including training design and implementation, resting on the correction of labor market and organizational failures. Such rights provide employee "checks" on several structural incentives for management opportunism and underinvestment in employee skills, through protection of specific human capital investments, and helping to circumvent information and moral hazard problems. This analysis stresses firm-specific skills, but concludes that investments in general and specific human capital are, in general, not fully separable, and that arguments on specific human capital extend to the case of "bundled" specific and general human capital formation. The implication is that EPRs in training can raise productive efficiency, and the effectiveness of training operations, towards their optimal levels. These hypotheses are examined through comparative case studies and a firm-level data set from North Rhine-Wesphalia.