Corporate Ownership and Initial Training in Britain, Germany and Switzerland

Paul Ryan, Karin Wagner, Silvia Teuber and Uschi Backes-Gellner
Additional contact information
Paul Ryan: King's College Cambridge
Karin Wagner: Hochschule fuer Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin

No 55, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: This paper considers whether listed companies with dispersed ownership invest less in training than do other firms, as part of a short-termist stance caused by pressure from the stock market. An analytical framework that supports the proposition involves three factors: high agency costs between the shareholders and managers of listed firms that have dispersed ownership; the use of highly geared performance-related pay to reward top managers; and accounting conventions that distort performance measures by requiring that spending on intangible assets be expensed not amortised. Managers then have the incentive and ability to restrict spending on training in order to increase their remuneration. Countervailing factors, including institutions of corporate governance, may however weaken or destroy such effects. Evidence is presented concerning the initial training programmes of 56 companies in engineering and retailing in Britain, Germany and Switzerland. The evidence is consistent with ownership effects in both sectors, but those effects are at most moderate in both incidence and strength. The skill requirements of competitive success in product markets appear more important than ownership.

Pages: 4 pages
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cfn, nep-eur and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0055_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0055

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().