Turbulence, training and unemployment

In this paper, we develop a matching model where firms invest in transferable human capital. Workers are endowed with heterogeneous abilities and, as a result of economic turbulence, can undergo a depredation of their human capital during unemployment spells. Firms take inefficient training decision because they do not fully valuate the additional productivity of the workers in future jobs (poaching externality) and the additional employability after separation (unemployment externality). Higher turbulence reduces the former externality and increases the latter. It then generates some opposite forces on the gap between efficient and equilibrium training, so that it does not necessarily require higher training subsidies. The general equilibrium analysis shows that, even if the Hosios condition holds, unemployment is higher than its efficient level, which requires an additional instrument such as ability-specific employment subsidies. We lastly run some computational experiments based on the French economy to illustrate these results: optimal subsidies are found to increase with turbulence, and the total subsidy turns out to be decreasing with wages, with an efficient rate that is reduced by three from the lowest to the highest wages. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.