Training, Soft Skills and Productivity: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Retail

Abstract

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Assessing Selection Bias in Non-Experimental Estimates of the Returns to Workplace Training

“…To the best of our knowledge, only four studies use randomized assignment to training to evaluate effects of workplace training. These, more recent, studies use personnel data from individual firms and report fairly large effects, between 10% and 21%, on measures of worker productivity (Murthy et al, 2008;De Grip and Sauermann, 2012;Adhvaryu et al, 2018;Prada et al, 2019).These studies provide causal evidence that workplace training programs affect worker productivity. 5 The contribution of our study is to provide a first assessment of the extent to which it is possible to recover the causal estimate of participation in workplace training programs using non-experimental data.…”

“…Heckman et al, 1998). While these type of single-firm studies are not representative, an increasing number of experimental studies on the returns to training allows us to learn more about the distribution of the returns to training across different settings and labor markets (De Grip and Sauermann, 2012;Adhvaryu et al, 2018;Prada et al, 2019).…”

“…Reliable estimates on the causal returns to training, however, are important for managers making decisions about whether or not to invest in workplace training, for decisions on whether governments should allocate resources to stimulate workplace training (Cedefop, 2009), and more generally to better understand the development of human capital, productivity and wages throughout the worker life-cycle. While experimental methods are increasingly used in the estimation of the returns to training (Murthy et al, 2008;De Grip and Sauermann, 2012;Adhvaryu et al, 2018;Prada et al, 2019), experiments are not always feasible or even possible. It is therefore important to learn to what extent non-experimental evaluations using standard econometric methods reduce selection bias.…”

“…From a societal point of view, the effect of training on productivity is arguably more interesting. 2 Studies estimating returns on worker productivity use personnel data from individual firms that contain direct measures of worker productivity, such as the number of pieces produced by garment workers (Adhvaryu et al, 2018), amount of sales for sales clerks (Prada et al, 2019), and average handling time for call agents (Liu and Batt, 2007;Murthy et al, 2008;De Grip and Sauermann, 2012).…”

Worker Reciprocity and the Returns to Training: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…This Finally, this study also contributes to the literature on the returns to workplace training, the literature on personality in the labor market, and the role of personality in the heterogeneity of estimated returns to training. In the literature on training returns, causal interpretation of estimated returns to training has been a major issue addressed mainly by fixed effects approaches with observational data, and, to a lesser degree, with experimental variation (De Grip and Sauermann, 2012;Schwerdt et al, 2012;Adhvaryu et al, 2018;Prada et al, 2019). At the same time, ever more studies show that personality traits are predictive for, among other factors, educational choices, job search, employment, and earnings.…”