Local norms describing the role of the state and the private provision of training

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 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. © 2022 The Authors

Keywords

Author Keywords

Apprenticeship training Social norms Normative attitudes towards the role of the state Private provision of training Public goods

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations

University of Bern, Bern, BE, Switzerland, IZA, Dusseldorf, Germany, Swiss Coordination Centre for Research in Education, Aarau, Switzerland, CESifo GmbH, Munich, Bayern, Germany

Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training, Lausanne, Switzerland, University of Bern, Bern, BE, Switzerland, IZA, Dusseldorf, Germany

Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training, Lausanne, Switzerland, University of Bern, Bern, BE, Switzerland

Funding & Acknowledgements

Staatssekretariat für Bildung, Forschung und Innovation, SBFI

Grant: 1315000817

We thank Manuel Aepli, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Giuliano Bonoli, Jörg Markowitsch, Sandra McNally and Ludger Woessmann, three anonymous referees, as well as conference participants in Barcelona, Berlin, Bern, Leuven, London, Manchester, Munich and Washington for many helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Mirjam Strupler for compiling the survey data for the purpose of this study; Romain Douard, Stéphane Henriod and Dominik Ullmann from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for helping us with various data issues; Marcel Hageman for great research assistance; and Sally Gschwend–Fisher for proofreading the manuscript. Financial support by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland is gratefully acknowledged (contract number 1315000817).

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Local norms describing the role of the state and the private provision of training

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