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...

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 this paper, we study whether Swiss employers substitute between training apprentices and hiring cross-border workers. Because both training apprentices and hiring skilled workers are costly for firms, we hypothesize that (easier) access to cross-border workers will lead some employers to...

Although there is evidence that apprenticeship training can ease the transition of youth into the labour market and thereby reduce youth unemployment, many policy makers fear that firms will cut their apprenticeship expenditures during economic crises, thus exacerbating the problem of youth...

The authors compare a firm's costs and benefits of providing apprenticeship training in Austria and Switzerland, using two original micro data sets. While both countries share a number of similarities, including an extensive vocational education and training (VET) system, and a common border,...