Do spatial agglomeration and local labor market competition affect employer-provided training? Evidence from the UK

In this paper we use British data to ask whether local employment density-which we take as a proxy of labor market competition-affects employer-provided training. We find that training is less frequent in economically denser areas. We interpret this result as evidence that the balance of poaching and local agglomeration effects on training is negative. The effect of density on training is not negligible: when evaluated at the average firm size in the local area, a 1% increase in density reduces the probability of employer-provided training by 0.014, close to 4% of the average incidence of this type of training in the UK. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.