Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...

In this paper we estimate the impact of temporary employment subsidies for young long-)term unemployed workers in Belgium on the transition rate from employment to non-employment. We account for selective participation on the basis of a multivariate duration model with correlated unobserved...

This paper evaluates counselling programmes in an equilibrium matching model where workers are heterogeneous in skill levels. Job search effort, labour demand and wages are endogenous. When wages are bargained over, raising the effectiveness of or the access to counselling programmes pushes...

We verify whether an income support policy for part-time workers in Belgium increases the transition from unemployment to non-subsidised, “regular” employment. Using a sample of 8630 long-term unemployed young women, whose labour market history is observed from 1998 to 2001, we implement the...

In july 2004, the Belgian government intensified monitoring within the Unemployment Insurance scheme. Workers claiming unemployment benefits for more than 13 months are notified that past job-search behavior will be monitored 8 months later. In one region the target group is counseled shortly...

In Belgium welfare agencies are subsidized to employ welfare recipients for a period sufficiently long to entitle them to benefits of the contributory social insurance program. This type of employment is called Social Employment (SE). This paper investigates the effect of SE on the exit rate...

This paper tries to bridge the gap between the theoretical and empirical analyses of the aggregate impacts of labor market policies (LMPs). Contrary to previous empirical studies, we conduct an econometric analysis based on sound theoretical foundations. The specification is based on an...

This paper investigates whether on-the-job training has an effect on the employability of workers. Using data from the Netherlands we disentangle the true effect of training incidence from the spurious one determined by unobserved individual heterogeneity. We also take into account that there...

Using longitudinal data from the Swiss Household Panel, this analysis suggests that the cross-sectional estimates of the returns to educational mismatch are significantly biased when unobserved heterogeneity is omitted in the wage equation. The results of the standard fixed effects model indeed...