Willingness to Pay for Managerial Training: A Case from the Knitwear Industry in Northern Vietnam

Managerial capital has received attention in recent years as one of the major determinants for enterprise productivity, growth, and longevity. While recent empirical studies make it clear that training intervention can improve the management level, it remains unclear why the managers had not made efforts to obtain these basic knowledge. To test the hypothesis that the reason lies in low valuation for obtaining knowledge, we conduct experimental training programs for the managers of SMEs in a knitwear cluster in rural town in Vietnam. We find that the demand for these trainings was indeed low prior to trainings, but increased greatly with own learning experience, and that those with a higher prior demand tended to benefit more from the training. We also examine the spill-over effects from their peers and find their heterogeneous impacts across the types of trainings conducted.