Article 2015

Mobility across firms and occupations among graduates from apprenticeship

Labour Economics
Journal · Vol. 34 · pp. 138-151
Abstract

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. Pure firm changes and occupation-and-job changes after graduation from apprenticeship result in average wage losses, whereas an occupation change within the training firm results in persistent wage gains. For the majority of cases a change of occupation involves a career progression. In contrast, for job switches the loss of firm-specific human capital seems to dominate. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Apprenticeship training Wages Job mobility Occupational mobility

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Funding & Acknowledgements
Grant: 31-7532.20/068
We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This paper was presented at the TREE conference 2013 in Basel and at the EALE conference 2014 in Lubljana. We are grateful for useful comments received at these conferences, and we benefited from insightful discussions with Christian Dustmann, Heike Solga, Alexandra Spitz-Oener, and Markus Zimmermann. We acknowledge financial support by the Ministry of Science and Art in Baden-Württemberg through the project “Die Wirkung des Bildungssystems auf den Übergang von Schule in Beruf — Evaluation des Pilotprojekts Erfolgreich in Ausbildung” (No. 31-7532.20/068 ) and the DFG through the project “Transitions in Education and Vocational Training and Labor Market Outcomes” (No. Fi 692/11-1 ) as well as through the Research Training Group 1659 “Interdependencies in the regulation of markets”. All errors are our sole responsibility.
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG
Grant: 692/11-1
We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This paper was presented at the TREE conference 2013 in Basel and at the EALE conference 2014 in Lubljana. We are grateful for useful comments received at these conferences, and we benefited from insightful discussions with Christian Dustmann, Heike Solga, Alexandra Spitz-Oener, and Markus Zimmermann. We acknowledge financial support by the Ministry of Science and Art in Baden-Württemberg through the project “Die Wirkung des Bildungssystems auf den Übergang von Schule in Beruf — Evaluation des Pilotprojekts Erfolgreich in Ausbildung” (No. 31-7532.20/068 ) and the DFG through the project “Transitions in Education and Vocational Training and Labor Market Outcomes” (No. Fi 692/11-1 ) as well as through the Research Training Group 1659 “Interdependencies in the regulation of markets”. All errors are our sole responsibility.
References 10 References
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