The Effect of Workplace vs School-Based Vocational Education on Youth Unemployment

Many European countries try to foster youth employment with workplace-based education, called apprenticeship. To analyze the impact of apprenticeship, we conduct a field experiment in France which shows that employers are almost indifferent between inviting to a job interview apprentices not retained in their training firm or students who had the same diploma after school-based vocational education. By combining the results of the field experiment with a search and matching model which takes into account the selection of apprentices retained in their training firm, we provide a framework to identify the channels through which apprenticeship impacts youth employment. We find that the positive impact on employment is essentially based on the retention of apprentices in their training firm while the productivity gap with vocational students is limited