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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 the 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.

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Using Italian data, I study the relationship between vocational education and self-reported happiness by focusing on individuals with at least a five-years high school degree, either vocational or academic. My instrumental variable strategy shows that individuals who have completed a vocational high school are more likely to report a high level of happiness than individuals who have completed an academic degree. I find no clear evidence that vocational graduates have a lower probability to be employed or earn lower wages than other graduates. I show that they live more than other graduates in small towns, where prices are lower and social life more rewarding, and have a less privileged parental background. Both facts may lead to more moderate aspirations and therefore contribute to higher happiness.

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We study the transitions from career to bridge jobs and to permanent retirement by European males aged 55 to 70 at the time of the interview in the late 2000s. We find that only 10.54 per cent of the workers in our sample who were in a career job at age 50 have moved to a bridge job by the time of the interview, much less than what [is] usually found in the United States. We also show that the exogenous increases in minimum retirement age that occurred during the past 20 years have had different effects in Central / Northern Europe (Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Sweden) and in Mediterranean Europe (Italy and Spain). In the North, transitions into bridge jobs have increased, with no significant effect on transitions into retirement. In the South, transitions into permanent retirement have decreased, with no significant effect on transitions into bridge jobs.

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Vocational education and training [VET] is highly valued by many. However, there is limited hard evidence that VET can improve education and labour market outcomes. The few existing studies yield mixed results partly due to differences in the structure and quality of VET across countries. In this report [the authors] investigate the effects of VET on adult skills and labour market outcomes by using the [Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies] PIAAC survey. Data comparability across countries, the breadth of countries involved, and the almost unique presence of information on assessed skills, training, earnings and employment makes this survey especially valuable to study the different facets of VET as compared to more academic education. On a less positive side, there are limits in these data that do not facilitate the implementation of rigorous empirical methodologies.

[The authors] consider the education careers available to individuals as alternative treatments in a multivalued treatment framework. It is assumed that individuals are exposed to four alternative treatments: (1) vocational education at the upper secondary or post-secondary level; (2) academic education at the upper secondary or post-secondary level; (3) vocational education at the tertiary level; and (4) academic education at the tertiary level. The report addresses the question of: what can we learn on VET and its effects on adult skills and labour market outcomes by using PIAAC? Section one of the report reviews VET systems and the trends in vocational education in the OECD countries for which data is available. The empirical methodology is introduced and discussed in detail in section two. Section three begins the presentation and discussion of the empirical results with a focus on the effects of VET on foundation and other skills. The effects of VET on earnings, employment and non-monetary outcomes such as health and civic behaviour are examined in section four and the effects on continuing training in section five. In the final section [the authors] compare outcomes between two treatments - less than upper secondary education and vocational upper secondary education.

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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.

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Several commentators have argued that vocational education provides a smoother school to work transition than academic education. In the long-run, however, the skills it provides depreciate faster and individuals with this type of education are less capable of adapting to technical change. Because of this, its short-term advantages trade off with expected long-term disadvantages in terms of employment, wages or both. Using two UK cohort studies, that allow [the authors] to follow individuals for at least 16 years in the labour market, [the authors] investigate whether this view has empirical support. For employment, [the] results indicate that the initial advantage associated to vocational education declines over time, without turning however into a disadvantage at later ages. For real net wages, the picture is more nuanced, with results that vary by cohort and educational level. Overall, [the] evidence suggests that vocational education is associated to lower expected long-term utility only for the younger cohort with higher (post-secondary) education. [The authors] further distinguish between dominant and non-dominant vocational education to account for the different bundles of skills held by individuals, and find that those with a more balanced bundle tend to have higher expected long-term earnings.

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This report looks at employer-provided training in Europe. We start with a brief outline of the economic theory of training. We then look at the recent facts, by combining data from two employer surveys, the European Investment Bank's Investment Survey (EIBIS) and Eurostat's Continuous Vocational Training Survey (CVTS). We review the recent empirical literature on the relationship between economic institutions and training and between training and productivity and consider whether financing constraints hamper the training provision by firms. The paper concludes by discussing policy implications.

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We develop a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of barriers to entry on workplace training. Our theoretical model indicates that there are two contrasting effects of deregulation on training. On the one hand, as stressed in the literature, with a given number of firms profits per unit of output fall, reducing the size of rents firms can enjoy if they train their employees. On the other hand, the number of firms increases following deregulation, thereby raising the output gain from training and improving investment incentives. While the balance of these effects is uncertain, numerical simulations show that for reasonable values of the parameters a positive relationship between deregulation and training prevails. We use repeated cross section data from the European Labour Force Survey to investigate empirically the relationship between product market regulation and training incidence in a sample of 15 European countries and 12 industrial sectors, which we follow for about eight years. Our empirical results are unambiguous and show that a 10 per cent increase in product market deregulation increases training incidence in the exposed industries by 2.8 to 5 per cent, depending on the selected empirical specification.

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Labour markets are currently in a phase of cyclical recovery and undergoing structural transformation due to globalisation, demographic trends, advancing digital technologies and automation and changes in labour market institutions. Against this background, businesses increasingly report that the limited availability of skills poses an impediment to corporate investment. Genuine skill constraints can negatively affect labour productivity and hamper the ability to innovate and adopt technological developments. For individual Europeans, not having 'the right skills' limits employability prospects and access to quality jobs. For Europe at large, persistent skill gaps and mismatches come at economic and social costs. This paper reviews the recent economic literature on skill mismatch and skill shortages with a focus on Europe.

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Due to pension reforms, minimum retirement age increased substantially in Italy between the second part of the 1990s and the early 2000s. [The authors] compare the training participation of pre- and post- reform cohorts of private sector employees and estimate that adding one year to minimum retirement age increases training incidence by 6.9 to 10.7 per cent, depending on the empirical specification. [The authors] find that policies that increase the residual working horizon are effective in increasing training participation by senior workers, and that traditional training policies that aim at reducing training costs by providing subsidies are ineffective.

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