Acquiring Skills: Market Failures, Their Symptoms and Policy Responses.

List of figures List of tables Preface List of contributors 1. Introduction: does the free market produce enough skills? Alison L. Booth and Dennis J. Snower Part I. Market Failures: the Causes of Skills Gaps: 2. Transferable training and poaching externalities Margaret Stevens 3. Credit constraints, investment externalities and growth Daron Acemoglu 4. Education and matching externalities Kenneth Burdett and Eric Smith 5. Dynamic competition for market share and the failure of the market for skilled labour David Ulph 6. The low-skill, bad-job trap Dennis J. Snower Part II. Empirical Consequences of Skills Gaps: 7. Changes in the relative demand for skills Stephen Machin 8. Skill shortages, productivity growth and wage inflation Jonathan Haskel and Christopher Martin 9. Workforce skills, product quality and economic performance Geoff Mason, Bart Van Ark, and Karin Wagner 10. Workforce skills and export competitiveness Nicholas Oulton Part III. Government Failures and Policy Issues: 11. Market failure and government failure in skills investment David Finegold 12. Training implications of regulation compliance and business cycles Alan Felstead and Francis Green 13. On apprenticeship qualifications and labour mobility Alison L. Booth and Stephen Satchell 14. Evaluating the assumptions that underlie training policy Ewart Keep and Ken Mayhew 15. Conclusions: government policy to promote the acquisition of skills Dennis J. Snower and Alison L. Booth Index.