The Effect of Economic Downturns on Apprenticeships and Initial Workplace Training: A Review of the Evidence

The existing empirical evidence on the relationship between apprenticeships, initial workplace training and economic downturns, is relatively scarce. The bottom line of this literature is that ratio of apprentices to employees tends to be (mildly) pro-cyclical and to decline during a recession, with the notable exception of the Great Depression, when it rose (at least in England). When broader measures of training are considered, which exclude apprentices, the weight of the evidence is in favour of counter-cyclical training incidence. This paper suggests that a possible reconciliation of these findings is based on recognizing that firms may have incentives to train incumbents during a downturn and at the same time to reduce the recruitment and training of young employees, who are engaged in the transition from school to work.apprenticeship training, economic downturns

Workplace Training and Labour Market Institutions in Europe

Arbeitsmarkt, Arbeitsverwaltung, Weiterbildung, Betriebliche Weiterbildung, EU-Staaten, OECD-Staaten, Labour market, Labour administration, Further training, In-house training, EU countries, OECD countries

Is Training more Frequent when Wage Compression is Higher? Evidence from 11 European Countries

In this empirical paper, I use the 1996 wave of the ECHP dataset to investigate the relationship between measures of wage compression and training incidence in 11 European countries. After controlling for individual factors and country specific institutional differences, I find evidence of a positive and significant relationship between wage compression and training, both firm-specific and general. While the finding for firm-specific training is consistent with both competitive and non-competitive approaches, the result for general training is only consistent with the non-competitive approach.training, Europe

Pappa Ante Portas: The effect of the husband's retirement on the wife's mental health in Japan

The \u201cRetired Husband Syndrome\u201d, that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. Using Japanese micro-data and the exogenous variation across cohorts in the maximum age of guaranteed employment induced by a 2006 Japanese reform, we estimate that the husband's earlier retirement significantly increases the probability that the wife reports symptoms related to the syndrome. We also find that retirement has a negative effect both on the household's economic situation and on the husband's own mental health, and that the higher economic distress contributes to reducing the wife's mental health

The effects of vocational education on adult skills, employment and wages: What can we learn from PIAAC?

We have shown that vocational education does not perform as well as academic education both in labour market outcomes and in the level of basic skills, including literacy and numeracy. This is especially true for higher education. Only at the upper secondary or post-secondary level does vocational education perform slightly better than academic education in the probability of being currently employed as well as in the time spent in paid employment, although the differences we find are small

Educational standards in private and public schools

When school quality increases with the educational standard set by schools, education before college needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools. An alternative configuration, with public schools offering a higher educational standard than private schools, is also possible, in spite of the fact that tuition levied by private schools is strictly positive. In our model, private schools can offer a lower educational standard at a positive price because they attract students with a relatively high cost of effort, who would find the high standards of public schools excessively demanding. With the key parameters calibrated for the US and Italy, our model predicts that majority voting in the US supports a system with high quality private schools and low quality public schools, as assumed by Epple and Romano, 1998. An equilibrium with low quality private schools is supported instead in Italy.private schools, public schools, majority voting

Barriers to Entry, Deregulation and Workplace Training: A Theoretical Model with Evidence from Europe

We study the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. With a given number of firms, deregulation reduces the size of rents per unit of output that firms can reap by training their employees. Yet, the number of firms increases, thereby raising output and profit gains from training and improving investment incentives. The latter effect always prevails. Our empirical analysis, based on repeated cross-section data from 15 European countries and 12 industries, confirms the predictions of the model and shows that deregulation increases training incidence.training, product market competition, Europe

Agglomeration Effects on Employer-Provided Training: Evidence from the UK

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the density of local economic activity – measured as the number of employees per squared kilometer – positively affects local average productivity. In this paper we use British data from the European Community Household Panel to ask whether local density affects employer-provided training. We find that training is less frequent in economically denser areas. We explain this result as the outcome of the interaction between the positive pooling effects and negative poaching and turnover effects of agglomeration. The size of the negative effect of density is not negligible: when evaluated at the average firm size in the local area, a 10 percent increase in density reduces the probability of employer-provided training by 0.07, more than 20 percent of the average incidence of training in the UK during the sample period.training, spatial economics, Britain

Free energies of Boltzmann Machines: self-averaging, annealed and replica symmetric approximations in the thermodynamic limit

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) constitute one of the main models for machine statistical inference and they are widely employed in Artificial Intelligence as powerful tools for (deep) learning. However, in contrast with countless remarkable practical successes, their mathematical formalization has been largely elusive: from a statistical-mechanics perspective these systems display the same (random) Gibbs measure of bi-partite spin-glasses, whose rigorous treatment is notoriously difficult. In this work, beyond providing a brief review on RBMs from both the learning and the retrieval perspectives, we aim to contribute to their analytical investigation, by considering two distinct realizations of their weights (i.e., Boolean and Gaussian) and studying the properties of their related free energies. More precisely, focusing on a RBM characterized by digital couplings, we first extend the Pastur-Shcherbina-Tirozzi method (originally developed for the Hopfield model) to prove the self-averaging property for the free energy, over its quenched expectation, in the infinite volume limit, then we explicitly calculate its simplest approximation, namely its annealed bound. Next, focusing on a RBM characterized by analogical weights, we extend Guerra's interpolating scheme to obtain a control of the quenched free-energy under the assumption of replica symmetry: we get self-consistencies for the order parameters (in full agreement with the existing Literature) as well as the critical line for ergodicity breaking that turns out to be the same obtained in AGS theory. As we discuss, this analogy stems from the slow-noise universality. Finally, glancing beyond replica symmetry, we analyze the fluctuations of the overlaps for an estimate of the (slow) noise affecting the retrieval of the signal, and by a stability analysis we recover the Aizenman-Contucci identities typical of glassy systems.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur