Contributions published at Empirical Research in Business, Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management (Uschi Backes-Gellner)

Financial attributes are potentially important influences on the viability of apprenticeship as a mode of vocational education and training. Two financial aspects are considered: apprentices’ pay, which determines the division of training costs between the trainee and the employer; and corporate ownership, which may influence the incentive to employers to provide training, insofar as it promotes or deters short-termist practice concerning investment in employees’ skills. Evidence is taken from fieldwork interviews with senior managers in 56 companies, spread across two sectors (metalworking, retailing) in three countries (Germany, Britain, Switzerland). The companies are matched by products and technologies, differentiated by bargaining status and type of ownership. The importance of apprenticeship relative to recruitment as a source of skills is found to vary greatly across companies. The pay of apprentices differs markedly between countries (highest in Britain, lowest in Switzerland) in association with the attributes of labour markets, trade unionism, and education systems. Listing on a stock market and having dispersed ownership are associated with more frequent financial upheaval and a lower training effort than are other ownership types.

This study provides the first econometric analysis on the dynamic dimension of establishment-level codetermination in Germany. We hypothesize that learning implies a change in the nature and scope of codetermination over time. Using unique data from small- and medium-sized establishments, our empirical analysis provides strong evidence that learning indeed plays a crucial role in the functioning of works councils. First, the probability of an adversarial relationship between management and works council is decreasing in the age of the council. Second, the council's age is positively associated with the probability that the council has an influence even on decisions where it has no legal powers. Third, productivity is increasing in the age of the council. Fourth, the quit rate is decreasing in the age of the council. However, the estimates also provide evidence of a codetermination life cycle.

Im Rahmen des Artikels wird argumentiert, dass die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen dazu führen, dass Schweizer Unternehmen - im Vergleich zu deutschen - in geringerem Ausmaß auf ihre eigenen Lehrlinge zurückgreifen, wenn es darum geht, freie Facharbeiterstellen in der Produktion zu decken.

null

Using the Swiss Graduate Survey, we study how the type of tertiary education an individual chooses (i.e., vocational or academic) influences career entry and labor market success after graduation. Our results show that vocational graduates face less risky career entry than academic graduates. Considering endogenous educational choice by using parental education as an instrument, we find higher returns for vocational tertiary education. In the longer term, initial educational type effects disappear, so vocational and academic graduates face the same risk and return. Therefore, career entry for vocational graduates compares favorably to that of academic graduates, while career success for both educational types equalizes over time.

According to standard human capital theory, firm-financed training cannot be explained if the skills obtained are general in nature. Nevertheless, in German-speaking countries, firms invest heavily in apprenticeship training although the skills are assumed to be general. In our paper, we study the extent to which apprenticeship training is general at all and how specificity of training may be defined based on Lazear's skill-weights approach. We build occupation-specific skill-weights and find that the more specific the skill portfolio in an occupation, the higher the net costs firms have to bear for these apprenticeship training occupations and, at the same time, the smaller the probability of an occupational change during an employee's entire career. Due to the new definition of occupational specificity, we thus find that apprenticeship training - previously assessed as general training - is very heterogeneous in its specificity

In times of sweeping demographic changes, policy makers and business executives in mature economies perceive workforce aging as one potential threat to the capacity for innovation and technological progress. However, evidence for age-dependency in innovative performance is still scarce. Pressing questions in this context are for example: - Does workforce age affect the innovative capacity of firms and regions, and if so, how and through which transmission channels do these effects occur? - What are the sources of possible age-dependency in innovative performance, in particular with respect to innovation-relevant human capital? - What are the policy implications of the interplay between workforce age and the capacity to produce technological advances in times of future workforce aging? Starting from a comprehensive survey and critical discussion of existing studies about the interplay between workforce age and innovation, this book suggests a new conceptual framework to study the age-dependency of innovation. Based on this, three empirical studies investigate how the age composition of a workforce affects inventive performance in European regions, to what extent certain staffing patterns experienced by German firms boost innovative performance and how a region’s entrepreneurial capacity relates to the age composition of its working-age population.

This paper applies Lazear’s skill-weights approach (2009) to analyze the specificity of skill combinations of various occupations and its effects on occupational mobility and wages. The results show that the more specific an occupation, the smaller the probability of an occupational change. We also identify clusters of occupations characterized by similar skill combinations and find that employees in specific occupations have a comparatively higher probability of changing occupations within a skill cluster than between skill clusters. Moreover, occupational mobility within a skill cluster results in wage gains, while between clusters it results in wage losses. Therefore, the acquired skill combination and the resulting skill cluster, rather than the occupation per se, crucially determines mobility. Thus, for educational policies, it is more important to study whether a skill cluster is sustainable than an occupation.

This paper examines whether individuals who become either entrepreneurs or employees follow systematically different educational paths to a given educational level. Following Lazear’s jack-of-all-trades theory, we expect that entrepreneurs aim at a balanced set of different skills – that is, they combine academic and vocational skills – while employees specialize in one skill. This means that entrepreneurs follow educational paths that combine different types of education, while employees follow same-type paths while climbing up the educational ladder. We use the Swiss Labor Force Survey to test our hypothesis. Our empirical findings are in line with Lazear’s theory and indicate that individuals who change between different types of education and acquire a more balanced set of skills are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Thus, the permeability of a country-specific educational system is one crucial determinant of entrepreneurship.

null

null

null

null