Firms' Training Investments and Post - Training Wages of Apprentices

In this paper, we examine the relation between a firm’s training investment and the post-training wages of apprenticeship graduates. For our analysis, we first calculate a training investment indicator using detailed firm-level information about training costs. We then merge the firm-level data with individual-level administrative data on employment and wages of apprenticeship graduates. We find that a firm investment in training relates positively with the graduates’ post-training wages. Doubling a firm’s training investments leads to a wage mark-up of about 2.8%. This result is robust to different specifications. However, we find that especially graduates from low-investment firms benefit from higher training investments while the wage mark-up for graduates from firms with already high levels of investment is statistically not significant.