Article 2025

Firm retention and productivity of apprentices

Empirical Economics
Journal · Vol. 68 · Issue 3 · pp. 1265-1280
Abstract

This study investigates the retention rate of young people in firms that offer apprenticeship positions. While the majority of training firms hire apprentices with the aim of retaining them when the contract ends, only a small proportion of youths actually transition into full-time employment in the same firm. To explain this phenomenon, I rely on a tractable model that incorporates firm decision-making processes, enabling an analysis of the retention rate. By estimating the productivity distribution of apprentices based on observed wage data from French surveys, the findings indicate that training firms, on average, benefit more from separating from apprentices rather than hiring them as workers. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2024.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Apprenticeship productivity Firm retention Maximum likelihood

Index Keywords

training maximum likelihood analysis recruitment (employment) labor productivity France
Author Affiliations
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH, Mannheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
References 10 References
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