Training and Lifetime Income

摘要

Following the pioneering work of Gary S. Becker (1964), the analysis of human capital accumulation has played an increasingly important role in economics. Where and how human capital is accumulated has become an important question. The workplace is one place where workers learn and become more productive, and on-the-job training (OJT) is one activity thought to be quantitatively important for human capital accumulation. In this paper, I develop a non-parametric methodology to estimate the net gains in lifetime income from OJT investments using wage data. Following the human capital theory, I assume that the key factor in wage growth is OJT and interpret the wage data using a dynamic human capital investment model. The strategy is to derive the technology of learning on the job using wage data and use the derived technology to compare the lifetime income when the worker optimally invests in his human capital to the one when he does not make any training investments at all.