Local Norms Describing the Role of the State and the Private Provision of Training

Andreas Kuhn (), Jürg Schweri and Stefan Wolter
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Andreas Kuhn: Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training

No 12159, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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 with 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, as well as to an instrumental-variable strategy that tackles the issue of potential endogeneity of normative attitudes.

Keywords: normative attitudes towards the role of the state; social norms; private provision of training; public goods; apprenticeship training; vocational education and training (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 D63 H41 I22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-war
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - revised version published in: European Journal of Political Economy, 2022, 75, 102226

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Related works:
Journal Article: Local norms describing the role of the state and the private provision of training (2022)
Working Paper: Local Norms Describing the Role of the State and the Private Provision of Training (2019)
Working Paper: Local Norms Describing the Role of the State and the Private Provision of Training (2019)
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