Estimating the return to training and occupational experience: The case of female immigrants

We formulate a dynamic discrete choice model of training and employment to measure the personal and social benefits from government provided training for a sample of high-skilled female immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel. We find that training has a significant impact on the mean offered wage in white-collar occupations, but not in blue-collar occupations. Training substantially increases the job-offer rates in both occupations. Counterfactual policy simulations show a substantial social gain from increasing the access to training programs, and the estimated model provides a good fit for within-sample, out-of-sample and aggregate trends using cross-sectional survey data.