In many Western countries, a sizeable group of people live on welfare benefits for a long time. Many of them suffer from mental health issues. This paper studies the labor market and mental health effects of an activation program targeting these long-term inactive people. We exploit the...

In a randomised controlled trial in Austria, lower caseloads in public employment offices led to more meetings of the unemployed with their caseworkers, more job offers, more program assignments, and more sanctions for noncompliance with job search requirements. More intensive counselling led to...

This paper analyses data from a large-scale field experiment where unemployed workers were randomly assigned to an additional caseworker meeting with the purpose to impose a broader job search strategy. We find that the meeting significantly increases job finding and is cost effective. However,...

There is still a lack of knowledge on how to effectively help the long-term unemployed into employment. We evaluate a wide range of active labour market policies for this target group, using a dynamic matching approach. Measures vary considerably in the extent to which they improve labour market...

We analysed a new counselling and support programme for people with low employment prospects in Austria. The Austrian Public Employment Service introduced regional pilots to investigate whether a new counselling strategy could improve labour market outcomes for this group. Eligible unemployed...

Many European countries are facing the key challenge of integrating low-skilled jobless young people into the labour market. From 2018 to 2020, the Public Employment Service (PES) in Vienna tested a new model of intensified support ("case management"). The target group consisted of young...

Digitization has spurred interest in the potential of statistical profiling to improve the targeting of active labor market policies. Despite growing adoption, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such profiling in program allocation is scarce. We evaluate a semi-automated statistical...

We partner with a Public Employment Service to examine whether jobseekers can be encouraged to reskill for shortage occupations. In a large-scale field experiment involving 100,000 recently unemployed individuals, we provide information on shortage occupations and related training opportunities....

This paper provides new estimates of the impact of the French tax credit on the employment outcomes of women. We model simultaneously the employment probability and the determinants of programme eligibility. We improve on earlier studies in this field that, using a single evaluation equation...

This paper proposes a new panel data structural gravity approach for estimating the trade and welfare effects of Brexit. The suggested Constrained Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood Estimator exhibits some useful properties for trade policy analysis and allows to obtain estimates and confidence...