Training Access, Reciprocity and Expected Retirement Age

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu This paper investigates whether employers can induce employees to postpone retirement by offering access to training courses that maintain job proficiency. We use unique, matched employer-employee surveys for the Dutch public sector, which include detailed information on a wide range of HR practices applied in the organization, as well as the expected retirement age of its employees. We find that training policies, as reported by employers, are significantly positively related to employee expected retirement age, irrespective of whether employees actually participate in training. We show that this positive relationship is driven by employees' positive reciprocal inclinations, indicating that provision of training may serve as a tool to motivate older employees in their job and consequently to retire later. The provision of training access may therefore complement existing pension reforms in many industrialized countries that aim to increase labor-force participation of older workers. Robustness analyses indicate that the relationship between offering training access and expected age of retirement is unlikely to be driven by reverse causality, self-selection, or the presence of other organizational characteristics. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: J24, J31, I2

Age, Ageing and Skills

“…Focussing on private sector employees, Brunello and Comi estimated effects more than twice as large as the ones estimated by Montizaan et al, a discrepancy likely due to the fact that the Italian reform affected relatively younger employees (40 to 56). Montizaan et al (2015) argue that not only retirement policies can affect training, but that training policies (in particular, offers of training by employers) affect expected retirement ages of employees, irrespective of whether or not the offered training is taken up. Apparently, simple provision of the possibility of training is enough to motivate older employees, thus inducing them to postpone actual retirement.…”

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

“…Although other, nonexperimental studies explore reciprocal reactions to training courses, it is not clear to what degree their results are driven by potential endogeneity of training participation(Mullen et al, 2006;Kampkötter and Marggraf, 2015;Montizaan et al, 2015b).…”