Revisiting the complementarity between education and training – the role of job tasks and firm effects

Abstract

This paper addresses the question to what extent the strong positive correlation between education and training can be attributed to differences in individual-, job- and firm-specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered characteristics, in particular, job tasks and firm-fixed effects. The results show that once job tasks are controlled for, the difference in training participation between educational groups drops considerably. In contrast, firm-fixed effects only play a minor role. Moreover, we show that workers performing nonroutine tasks are considerably more likely to participate in training than workers with routine tasks.