"Of the typically cited agglomeration advantages labor market pooling receives strong empirical support - yet remains under-explored theoretically. This paper presents a model of human capital formation in an imperfectly competitive, pooled local labor market with heterogeneous workers and...

"Whilst in applied empirical research, training in general human capital is mainly explained by structural characteristics of firms, this paper introduces business expectations as an additional explanatory factor. Business expectations are strictly time-variate and firm-specific and reflect both...

"The German dual apprenticeship system has come under pressure in recent years because enterprises have not been willing to provide a sufficient number of apprenticeship positions. An argument that is frequently put forward is that the gap could be closed if more firms were willing to incur net...

"The Swiss mass apprenticeship system is market based. The share of training firms as a percentage of all firms is therefore an indicator which receives much public attention. The share of training firms declined markedly from 1985 to 2001, dropping from 24.7 to 17.6%. This has often been...