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.