Why Some Firms Train Apprentices and Many Others Do Not
By Stefan C. Wolter, Jürg Schweri, Samuel Mühlemann. Social Science Research Network, 2006
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The latest study investigating the cost-benefit ratio of apprenticeship training for Swiss companies has shown that most apprentices offset the cost of their training during their apprenticeship on the basis of the productive contribution of the work they perform. Given this outcome, it is worth investigating why so many firms choose not to train apprentices. Maximum-likelihood selection models were used to estimate the net cost of training for firms without an apprenticeship programme. The models show, firstly, that non-training firms would incur significantly higher net cost during the apprenticeship period if they would switch to a training policy and, secondly, that this less favourable cost-benefit ratio is determined less by cost than by absence of benefit. For the apprenticeship system as such the results indicate that, as long as training regulations and the market situation permit a cost-effective training of apprentices, companies do not need specific labour market regulations or institutions to offer training posts. In this respect, the Swiss findings might be of interest for the ongoing German discussion about the expected repercussions of a more general labour market deregulation on the apprenticeship training system.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/92b37868e245423ac9c2f6645f998a8d733604af
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Efficiency and equity of European education and training policies (2006, background): “Swiss evidence shows that firms’ probability to train apprentices is strongly affected by the ratio between costs and benefits of training to them, in particular in terms of whether there are benefits of work to be performed productively by apprentices (Muehlemann et al. 2005; Wolter et al. 2006).”
- Regional Effects on Employer-Provided Training: Evidence from Apprenticeship Training in Switzerland (2006, unknown): “…that the lower the relative productivity, the higher the likelihood that a firm lays off their apprentices after training.13 The effects of the firm-level variables are, after the inclusion of regional variables, similar to previous studies, e.g. Wolter et al. (2006) or Muehlemann et al. (2005).”