Article Green Open Access 2019

Poaching and Firm-Sponsored Training

British Journal of Industrial Relations
Journal · Vol. 57 · Issue 1 · pp. 143-181
Abstract

A series of seminal papers argues that poaching hampers company-sponsored general training. Empirically, however, the existence and extent of poaching remain open questions. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identify poaching. We find that only few apprenticeship training firms in Germany are ‘poaching victims’ or ‘poaching raiders’. Victims are more likely to be in a temporary downturn and raiders are more likely to be growing. Victims hardly change their training strategy after poaching and poaching seems be a transitory event. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduce apprenticeship-type training and need to convince firms to participate in training. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Author Affiliations
Universität Zürich, Zurich, ZH, Switzerland
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Wurzburg, Bayern, Germany, ZEW Mannheim, Hannover, Germany, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, Dorset, United Kingdom
Funding & Acknowledgements
Bundesamt für Berufsbildung und Technologie, BBT
We are grateful for the discussion and comments by Giorgio Brunello, Simon Janssen, Raymond Montizaan, Christian Pfeifer, Dario Pozzoli, Paul Ryan, Stefan Wolter and Ludger Wössmann, the editor David Marsden and two anonymous referees. The research was partly supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology through its Leading House on Economics of Education, Firm Behaviour and Training Policies. We thank the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the Federal Employment Agency at the Institute for Employment Research for the data access and the support with analysis of the LIAB data. Data access was via guest research spells at FDZ and afterwards via controlled data remote access at the FDZ. The data basis of this paper is the LIAB longitudinal version 2. We also thank Gudrun Schönfeld and Harald Pfeifer for providing additional statistics from the latest BiBB cost/benefit survey.
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