Heterogeneous Effects of Recurrent Education across Workers’ Tasks
In recent years, government support for recurrent education has been expanded with the aim of improving labor productivity in Japan; however, participation remains limited. To make effective use of limited policy resources, it is necessary to identify effective forms of recurrent education and to prioritize support accordingly. This paper focuses on the possibility that the effects of recurrent education differ depending on workers’ tasks and empirically examines this heterogeneity using a fixed-effects difference-in-differences model with data from the Japan Household Panel Survey (JHPS/KHPS). The results show that government-supported forms of recurrent education, such as schooling, have significant effects on workers engaged in routine tasks, while non-supported forms, such as seminars, have significant effects on those engaged in manual tasks; in contrast, the effects are limited for those engaged in abstract tasks. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of recurrent education varies with both the form of education and workers’ tasks, and provide important implications for the content of recurrent education programs as well as for structural challenges in the Japanese labor market.
