Training, Wages and Employment Security: An Empirical Analysis on European Data

We use data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to assess the effects of employee training on the individual labour market performance of different labour market groups in EU countries. We find significant training rage premia only in the case of young or highly educated employees. By contrast training appears to have a strong impact on employment security in the case of both older and low-educated workers. To reconcile this apparent contradiction, we need to take into account that, as standard in the literature, wage premia are estimated on a troncated sample including only employed workers. Due to downward wage rigidity, those workers who are unable to maintain their prociuctivity are more frequently laid—off rather than experiencing a wage fall and be retained in employment and thereby excluded from our sample.