Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare a firm’s net cost and post-apprenticeship benefits of providing apprenticeship training in Austria and Switzerland: two countries with many similarities but some critical institutional differences. Design/methodology/approach: The authors draw...

Summary In many countries on the European continent, it is feared that public funding of tertiary education (university and non-university) leads to an undesirable redistribution of income “from the bottom up”. The calculation of private rates of return is one way of answering this and other...

Summary Attempts to liberalize shopping hours often fail because of the resistance and arguments of retail sector employees who fear that this would cause their working conditions to deteriorate. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that compared the willingness of sales...

Labour market expectations and especially wage expectations are important determinants for individual schooling decisions. However, research on individual expectations of students is scarce. The paper presents the Swiss results of a survey that was conducted in ten European countries. Its main...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths – all leading to a tertiary educational degree. The paper seeks to distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of labour market outcomes after the initial vocational basic education (ISCED 3). Design/methodology/approach – A multinomial logit model is used for examining the effect of school resources and other factors on students'...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to derive an empirical method to identify different types of training strategies of companies based on publicly available company data. Design/methodology/approach – Using a ten‐year panel, the within‐firm retention rate, defined as the average...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse why small firms provide less training to their employees than their larger counterparts. The hypothesis is that large firms are endowed with certain firm characteristics that require more training and with some that allow them to obtain larger...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of job‐training programs, initiated by the Moroccan government and called “special training contracts”, on the performance of Moroccan firms. Design/methodology/approach – Two databases (MICT, OFPPT) of Moroccan firms were...

This paper is about the effects of unemployment on consumption behaviour through “job security” in Switzerland. Based on a behavioural model of consumption the paper establishes the links between job security and consumption empirically. In a second step, perceived “job security” as...