School‐to‐work transition: apprenticeship versus vocational school in France

There has recently been a strong drive to develop apprenticeship in France, as one means of decreasing youth unemployment. Our aim in this paper is to try to measure the “pure” within‐firm training effect on school‐to‐work transition. We address the problem of the transition to the first job, using a model of simultaneous maximum likelihood estimation of several probabilities and of the parameters of the probability density function linked to the exit from unemployment. We conclude that apprentices have a distinct advantage over those who attended vocational school. This effect is stronger when we correct for the negative selection bias associated with the choice of apprenticeship.