Firms and Markets Seminar
 
Abstract:
Apprenticeship and vocational education combine part-time formal education with training and experience at the workplace. No information about preferences of employers between these two profiles are available in the literature. To provide some, we measure the chances of getting a callback from employers for unemployed youths who were formerly either apprentices or vocational students. The method involves sending résumés, to actual job offers, of unemployed young applicants who are similar except for the pathway through which they got their secondary school diploma. We sent 3,110 applications from January to July 2018 to job offers posted in France for cook and bricklayer positions. We find no difference between the probability of callback between apprentices and vocational students. These results suggest that employers are indifferent between hiring vocational students or apprentices in the two occupations studied in the paper.
(Joint work with Pierre Cahuc)