Apprentice pay in Britain, Germany and Switzerland: Institutions, market forces and market power

This is the accepted version of the original publication in the European Journal of Industrial Relations, which is available online at http://ejd.sagepub.com/content/19/3/201.The pay of metalworking apprentices is high in Britain, middling in Germany and low in Switzerland. We analyse these differences using fieldwork evidence and survey data, drawing on both economic and institutionalist theories. Several institutional attributes influence apprentice pay, partly by affecting supply and demand in markets for training places. Institutional support for apprenticeship training appears to involve important complementarities in both Germany and Switzerland, in contrast to Britain’s less coherent and more market-driven approach.We thank the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, Anglo-German Foundation, SKOPE (Oxford), the Swiss federal government (OPET/SERI) and WZB (Berlin) for financial support

Head Exposure to Acceleration Database in Sport (HEADSport): a kinematic signal processing method to enable instrumented mouthguard (iMG) field-based inter-study comparisons

Objective Instrumented mouthguard (iMG) systems use different signal processing approaches limiting field-based inter-study comparisons, especially when artefacts are present in the signal. The objective of this study was to assess the frequency content and characteristics of head kinematic signals from head impact reconstruction laboratory and field-based environments to develop an artefact attenuation filtering method (HEADSport filter method).Methods Laboratory impacts (n=72) on a test-dummy headform ranging from 25 to 150 g were conducted and 126 rugby union players were equipped with iMGs for 209 player-matches. Power spectral density (PSD) characteristics of the laboratory impacts and on-field head acceleration events (HAEs) (n=5694) such as the 95th percentile cumulative sum PSD frequency were used to develop the HEADSport method. The HEADSport filter method was compared with two other common filtering approaches (Butterworth-200Hz and CFC180 filter) through signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and mixed linear effects models for laboratory and on-field events, respectively.Results The HEADSport filter method produced marginally higher SNR than the Butterworth-200Hz and CFC180 filter and on-field peak linear acceleration (PLA) and peak angular acceleration (PAA) values within the magnitude range tested in the laboratory. Median PLA and PAA (and outlier values) were higher for the CFC180 filter than the Butterworth-200Hz and HEADSport filter method (plt;0.01).Conclusion The HEADSport filter method could enable iMG field-based inter-study comparisons and is openly available at https://github.com/GTBiomech/HEADSport-Filter-Method.Data are available upon reasonable request. Anonymous data are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author

Poaching and firm-sponsored training: first clean evidence

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training. However, the extent of poaching, its determinants and consequences, remains an open empirical question. We provide a novel empirical identification strategy for poaching and investigate its causes and consequences. We find that only a small number of training firms in Germany are poaching victims. Firms are more likely to poach employees during an economic downturn. Training firms respond to poaching by lowering the share of new apprentice intakes in the following years

Poaching and Firm-Sponsored Training

A series of seminal theoretical papers argues that poaching of employees may hamper company-sponsored general training like apprenticeship training in Germany. Empirically however, the existence, extent and consequences of poaching still remain an open question. We provide a novel empirical strategy to identify poaching and investigate its causes and consequences. We find that only a few apprenticeship training firms in Germany are poaching victims or raiders. Poaching victim firms are more likely to be in a temporary downturn and raiding firms are more likely to increase their workforce. Poaching victims hardly change their training strategy after poaching. Thus, poaching is a transitory event and not a general threat to apprenticeship training. This is an important result for countries that intend to introduce apprenticeship type of training and need to convince firms to participate in their endeavour