The impact of public and private job training in Colombia

We present various matching estimators of the impact on earnings of beneficiaries of public and private job training programs in Colombia. We estimate propensity scores controlling for a wide variety of personal and socioeconomic background variables of the individuals. The effect of training measured by the mean impact of the treatment on the treated, show that: (i) for youths no institution has a significant impact in the short or long run but the private for males, (ii) for adult males, neither the SENA nor the aggregate of public institutions have a significant impact in the short or the long run, (iii) for adult females trained at the SENA, there are positive but not significant impacts in the short run and larger and close to significant in the long run. The aggregate of the pubic institutions have a higher impact that is significant in the long run, and (iv) for adults trained at private institutions, there are large and significant effects in both the short and the long run, but for adult males in the short run where the effects are smaller and only barely significant. In addition, neither short nor long courses provided by SENA seem to have a significant impact on earnings. In general, females benefit more from both of these courses than males. Finally, a cost benefit analysis shows that private institutions, under the assumption of equal direct unitary costs than SENA, are more profitable that the aggregate of public institutions, which is in turn more profitable than the SENA.