مزایای بیکاری، حمایت از کار و ماهیت سرمایه گذاری های آموزشی

This paper examines the impact of labor market institutions covering the risk of unemployment on the nature of educational investment. We offer a matching model of unemployment in which individuals of a given education determine the scope (or adaptability) and intensity (or productivity) of their human capital before entering the labor market. Our model features an increasing relationship between match surplus and the return to adaptability skills. This relationship explains why matching frictions promote adaptability skills instead of productivity skills, and why unemployment benefits and job protection create the incentive for productivity skill acquisition.

Labor market institutions (LMIs) and the magnitude of educational investment in specialized human capital have been put forward to explain the relatively low performance of a number of European labor markets since the end of the 1970s. On the one hand, the generosity of unemployment insurance and the strictness of employment protection legislation tend to favor the persistence of high unemployment rates while slowing down the job reallocation process necessary to sustain high productivity growth (see Ljungqvist and Sargent, 1998, Mortensen and Pissarides, 1999 and Nickell, 1997). On the other hand, vocationally-oriented European schooling systems tend to alter workers' between-sector mobility (see Krueger & Kumar, 2004). These two lines of argument are separately advanced. The purpose of this paper is to examine how unemployment benefits and job protection affect the extent of specialization of schooling choices.

Do labor market institutions direct schooling investments towards more specialized skills? We provide a theoretical analysis based on the idea whereby students face a trade-off between adaptability and productivity skills. Adaptability skills expand the scope of skills, thereby increasing the degree of skill transferability across jobs. Productivity skills increase workers' expected output once in a job that s/he can actually occupy. Our model features an increasing relationship between match surplus and the return to adaptability skills. This relationship explains why matching frictions promote adaptability skills rather than productivity skills, and why unemployment benefits and job protection create the incentive for productivity skill acquisition.