Research

Abstract: This paper evaluates a mass training program for in-service vocational schoolteachers in Indonesia. The government rolled out an intensive, field-specific professional development program provided by private sector firms to enhance teachers’ vocational skills. We use a randomized evaluation to assess its effects on teachers' knowledge, classroom practices, expectations of students' outcomes, and school quality. We find that this program crowded out existing professional development offerings with no increase in overall training participation. There is little evidence of improvements in teachers' knowledge or measures of school quality, albeit with suggestions of increased use of Information and Communication Technologies in the classroom.

Abstract: Workers with different education levels consistently do the same jobs differently. We introduce a model in which each education level affords workers a menu of skill packages. While we classify skills into four broad categories, we allow the productivity and substitutability of skills to differ across occupations. Moreover, the change in productivity over time is specific to each skill and occupation. Consequently, we implicitly allow the nature of skills within these broad aggregates to differ among occupations. We identify the cost of acquiring different skills based primarily on these within-occupation differences. We find that more educated workers have lower costs of investing in social, adaptive, and abstract skill while less educated workers acquire manual skill at lower relative cost. These cost differences are consistent with the occupations workers with different levels of education choose.