The paper assess the potential free-riding of non-training firms on the training efforts of training firms and analyses differences in recruitment of apprenticeship graduates trained elsewhere between training and non-training firms. The paper shows that only 5.6 per cent of non-training firms...

Apprenticeship training in Germany is generally considered to be an investment of companies into the human capital of their apprentices. This view is mainly based on the German cost benefit studies which testify training firms high net costs for their apprenticeships, but these results have not...

In the theoretical literature on why companies train apprentices three different approaches are usually distinguished: the investment, the substitution and the reputation motive. The aim of our paper is to empirically identify whether a company follows one or the other motive or even more than...

This paper analyses the impact of replacing unskilled or semi-skilled employees by apprentices on establishment performance. We use representative matched employer–employee panel data and correct for different sources of estimation biases. We show that an increase of the proportion of...

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and...