The New Deal for Young People five years on

The New Deal for Young People is the major welfare-to-work pro-gramme in the UK. It is a mandatory multistage policy targeted at 18- to 24-year-old unemployed people. This paper investigates the long-term effectiveness of the programme in terms of enhancing the (re-)employment probability of participating men. It exploits the eligibility rule to identify a suitable counterfactual relying upon a simple regression discontinuity design. The combination of job-search assistance, training, wage subsidies and job experience enhances employability by about 4.6 per cent and this effect lasts over different cohorts.