JOB-TRAINING, NEW TECHNOLOGY AND LABOR TURN

Vocational training incidence for those at work is frequently financed partly or wholly by employers, who then lose part of their investment return if workers migrate to other firms. We investigate the incidenc e of training and the incidence of job-to-job mobility for a large sam ple of British workers in 1984 and 1989. We also analyse the role of s ectoral technology characteristics in influencing patterns of both tra ining and inter-firm mobility. Our results demonstrate that job-to-job mobility is highest for the young and higher for those with formal ed ucational qualifications than for the unskilled. These are also charac teristics which engender a higher training propensity; so, unavoidably , private gains to training for employers are below social gains for t hese young people. public-sector workers have high training rates but low mobility; this perhaps explains the lack of perception of the poac hing problem by successive governments. Sectoral R&D activity is assoc iated with move training and less mobility for men; in contrast, women are more likely to train and are less mobile if the rate of adoption of innovation is rapid.