Local norms describing the role of the state and the private provision of training

Apprenticeship systems are essentially based on the voluntary participation of firms that provide, and usually also finance, training positions, often incurring considerable net training costs. One potential, yet under-researched explanation for this behavior is that firms act in accordance with the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:European Journal of Political Economy 2022-12, Vol.75, p.102226, Article 102226
Main Authors: Kuhn, Andreas, Schweri, Jürg, Wolter, Stefan C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Apprenticeship systems are essentially based on the voluntary participation of firms that provide, and usually also finance, training positions, often incurring considerable net training costs. One potential, yet under-researched explanation for this behavior is that firms act in accordance with the norms and expectations they face in the local labor market in which they operate. In this paper, we focus on the Swiss apprenticeship system and ask whether local norms towards the private, rather than the public, provision of training influence firms’ decisions to offer apprenticeship positions. In line with this hypothesis, we find that the training incidence is higher in communities characterized by a stronger norm towards the private provision of training, which we measure using local results from two national-level plebiscites that explicitly dealt with the role of the state in the context of the apprenticeship system. This finding turns out to be robust to a series of alternative specifications and robustness checks. •Many Swiss employers voluntarily provide training positions, often at significant training costs.•We hypothesize that local norms favoring the private provision of goods influence employers’ training decisions.•We use national-level voting results to measure these local norms.•We find that the training incidence is higher where the norm towards the role of the state is more restrained.•This finding is robust across various alternative specifications and robustness checks.
ISSN:0176-2680
1873-5703
DOI:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2022.102226