Why do low-educated workers invest less in further training?

By D. Fouarge, T. Schils, Andries de Grip. Social Science Research Network, 2010

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several studies document that low-educated workers participate less often in further training than high-educated workers. This article investigates two possible explanations: low-educated workers invest less in training because of (1) the lower economic returns to these investments or (2) their lower willingness to participate in training. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that the economic returns to training for low-educated workers are positive and not significantly different from those for high-educated workers. However, low-educated workers are significantly less willing to participate in training. We show that this lesser willingness to train is driven by economic preferences, and personality traits.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8941fff2326fada54cd1f24a3749a98b08024e56