A small number of recent empirical studies for several countries has reported the intriguing finding that the 'advantage' previously enjoyed by men in respect of training incidence and reported in earlier work in the literature has been reversed. The present paper explores the sources of the...

Dual apprenticeship training is a market-driven form of education at the upper secondary level, taking place in firms as well as in vocational schools. So far, little is known about the impact of the business cycle on the number of apprenticeship programs offered by firms. Using panel-data of...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. There is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship, and what type. To...

Using a specific micro-dataset with information on working histories, we analyse the labour market entry of Spanish youths who have completed vocational education. According to the education system, young people can enter the labour market with vocational high school (upper secondary education)...

The stylized literature on foreign direct investment suggests that developing countries should invest in the human capital of their labour force in order to attract foreign direct investment. However, if educational quality in developing country is uncertain such that formal education is a noisy...

Distinguishing carefully between mobility across firms and across occupations, this study provides causal estimates of the wage effects of mobility among graduates from apprenticeship in Germany. Our instrumental variables approach exploits variation in regional labor market characteristics....

This paper focuses on the determinants of the labor market situation of young people in developed countries and the developing world, with a special emphasis on the role of vocational training and education policies. We highlight the role of demographic factors, economic growth and labor market...

This paper analyzes how life-cycle unemployment of former apprentices depends on the size of the training firm. We start from the hypotheses that the size of training firms reduces long-run cumulated unemployment exposure, e.g. via differences in training quality and in the availability of...

We expand Acemoglu and Pischke's seminal model of training in imperfect labor markets by including the system of collective wage bargaining and the components of firms' training costs. Thus we can adapt their model to institutional changes that occurred since the 1990s. The model and the...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...