revised version published in: Labour Economics, 2021, 70, 101979
In this paper, we study whether Swiss employers substitute between training apprentices and hiring cross-border workers. Because both training apprentices and hiring skilled workers are costly for firms, we hypothesize that (easier) access to cross-border workers will lead some employers to substitute away from training their own workers. We account for potential endogeneity issues by instrumenting a firm’s share of cross-border workers using a firm’s distance to the national border and therefore its possibility to fall back on cross-border workers to satisfy its labor demand.
We find that both OLS and 2SLS estimates are negative across a wide range of alternative specifications, suggesting that firms substitute between training and hiring workers when the supply of skilled workers is higher. Our preferred 2SLS estimate implies that the increase in firms’ share of crossborder workers within our observation period, from 1995 to 2008, led to about 3,500 fewer apprenticeship positions (equal to about 2% of the total number of apprentice positions).
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.