Employer education, agglomeration and workplace training: poaching vs knowledge spillovers

Croce, Giuseppe and Di Porto, Edoardo and Ghignoni, Emanuela and Ricci, Andrea (2013) Employer education, agglomeration and workplace training: poaching vs knowledge spillovers. Working Paper. Dipartimento di economia e diritto, Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma.

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of the employer in workplace training, a novelty with respect to the literature on this topic. Taking advantage of a unique dataset on Italy, we study how individual employer profile and the agglomeration of employers influence firms‟ propensity to invest in training. Our findings show that highly educated employers have a greater propensity to invest in workplace training. Moreover, we are able to capture the effect of employers‟ human capital agglomeration on the training decision. We assert that such agglomeration leads to two different alternative scenarios: 1) a poaching effect may prevail, therefore competition among employers induces less propensity to train workers; 2) a positive knowledge spillover effect may prevail leading to a greater propensity to engage in training. We test these two options discovering that in the Italian case, where small businesses are prominent, the first effect is stronger. Several econometrics issues are considered in our empirical strategy: the skewed and bounded nature of the training decision indicator, the endogeneity issues derived from the agglomeration effect as well as the cross section dependence problems affecting standard errors.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working Paper)
Additional Information:	JEL codes: J24; O15; O18; R23
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Workplace training; poaching; knowledge spillovers; entrepreneurship cluster; employer’s education; social capital; proximity
Subjects:	300 Scienze sociali > 330 Economia
Depositing User:	Dipartimento economia e diritto
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2013 09:23
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2013 09:23
URI:	http://eprints.bice.rm.cnr.it/id/eprint/7142

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