Government-Sponsored Vocational Education for Adults

This chapter considers the literature on government-sponsored vocational training for adults, with a particular substantive focus on training provided via active labor market programs and a particular geographic focus on Western Europe and North America. We begin with a discussion of the underlying economic theory of investment in human capital over the life cycle and of government intervention in that process, along with models of participation in government programs and in particular services within those program. Building on the theory as well as on institutional knowledge and well-known empirical regularities related to participation in training, we then lay out the common applied econometric approaches to estimating the impacts of government-sponsored training for adults and consider important design and measurement issues common to studies in the empirical literature. Six case studies that consider the institutions and evaluation literatures in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and Denmark come next. These countries all provide a rich base of compelling empirical evidence and also serve to illustrate a wide variety of institutional choices and applied econometric methodologies. The penultimate section considers what we know about matching potential trainees to training and to particular training types, an important topic in light of the strong evidence of heterogeneity in treatment effects provided by the case studies. The final section summarizes the literature and its limitations and offers suggestions for future research.