 What is in Local Dialects? A Field Experiment on Social Distance and Human Capital Development in Job TrainingSherry Xin Li, Shengzhe Wang and Shuo Yang Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2023, vol. 106, issue C Abstract: This paper presents a field experiment at a large garment factory in China to investigate whether the reduced social distance between new sewing workers and their trainers affects the efficacy of on-the-job training. During the factory's new-worker training program, we randomly matched trainers and trainees based on whether they spoke the same dialects. We find that trainers voluntarily transfer more sewing techniques to trainees who speak the same dialects than to those who do not. This positive effect of shared dialects operates partially through non-work-related social closeness between trainers and trainees. Our results suggest that closer social distance could be cost-efficient leverage to reduce training costs and improve training outcomes. Keywords: Human capital development; dialects; social distance; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:106:y:2023:i:c:s2214804323000940 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2023.102068 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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