In this paper, we study whether Swiss employers substitute between training apprentices and hiring cross-border workers. Because both training apprentices and hiring skilled workers are costly for firms, we hypothesize that (easier) access to cross-border workers will lead some employers to substitute away from training their own workers. We account for potential endogeneity issues by instrumenting a firm’s share of cross-border workers using a firm’s distance to the national border and therefore its possibility to fall back on cross-border workers to satisfy its labor demand. We find that both OLS and 2SLS estimates are negative across a wide range of alternative specifications, suggesting that firms substitute between training and hiring workers when the supply of skilled workers is higher. Our preferred 2SLS estimate implies that the increase in firms’ share of cross-border workers within our observation period, from 1995 to 2008, led to about 3500 fewer apprenticeship positions (equal to about 2% of the total number of apprentice positions).

在本文中，我们研究了瑞士雇主是否在培训学徒和雇用跨境工人之间替代。因为培训学徒和雇用熟练工人对公司来说都是昂贵的，所以我们假设（更容易）获得跨境工人会导致一些雇主代替培训自己的工人。我们通过使用企业到国境的距离来衡量企业在跨境工作人员中所占的份额，从而解决潜在的内生性问题，因此，有可能依靠跨境工作人员来满足其劳动力需求。我们发现，在广泛的替代规范中，OLS和2SLS估计均为负，这表明，当熟练工人的供应量较高时，企业会在培训和雇用工人之间进行替代。