Continuing education of employees, unemployment and efficiency: empirical and theoretical analyses.

Summary The central theme of this thesis is the relationship between training and layoff decisions, and the economic efficiency of these decisions. Training is understood here as firm-specific training from which employees benefit during their working life via their employer. The first chapter assesses, on the basis of individual data, the returns to training in France, both in terms of mobility (job-to-job and job-to-unemployment) and in terms of wage gains. The second chapter examines how employment protection, differentiated according to the age of employees, affects the willingness of entrepreneurs to train their workers. The third chapter shows that training and job destruction decisions are strongly complementary. Therefore, training subsidies targeted by skill level and combined with taxes on layoffs (also targeted by skill level) must be put in place for these decisions to be socially optimal. The fourth chapter analyzes how the risk of dismissal, differentiated between workers of the same skill level according to their skill level, can be a source of wage inequality. Finally, the last chapter stresses that, in the face of wage, training and layoff risk disparities between workers of the same skill level, training subsidies and layoff taxes, which are necessary for economic efficiency, should not only differ by socio-professional category, but also within each one.