Another piece of the puzzle: Firms’ investment in training as production of optimal skills inventory

Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training

Table 1 Descriptive statistics—overview (full sample).

Variable	Mean	St. Dev.	Min.	Max.
Number of apprentices (per firm)	0.57	4.40	0	700
Overage costs
Total overage costs^a	2.305	2.132	− 12.599	25.862
Net training costs	1.822	1.693	− 9.447	20.463
Retention risk	0.27	0.09	0.04	0.65
Underage costs
Total underage costs^b	9.111	48.866	− 0.832	1610.237
Hiring costs	0.864	0.941	− 0.510	16.658
Outage costs	6.840	41.198	− 1.349	1371.456
Miscast risk	0.18	0.05	0.11	1.05
Demand structure
Industry volatility	4.50	7.23	0.02	21.67
Controls
Firm’s size (in #employees)	20.96	172.99	1	25,341
Firm’s age (in years)	29.70	47.37	1	919
Collective agreements (binary)	0.35	0.48	0	1
Worker representation (binary)	0.17	0.37	0	1
Training occupation	9 different groups of training occupations
Federal state	16 different federal states (regions)
Number of observations	3252 observations

Table reports all costs in 10,000 Euros per person with ^a Total Overage Costs = Net Training Costs * (1 + Retention Risk), and ^b Total Underage Costs = (Hiring Costs + Outage Costs)* (1 + Miscast Risk)