Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become anincreasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are beingsupported by various governmental programs. Potential benefits include not only the end ofunemployment for the new entrepreneur but...

Support schemes for unemployed aiming for self-employment have been recently reformedseveral times. In 2003, the start-up subsidy was added to the existing bridging allowance...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based onthe personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction ofentrepreneurial success...

In many countries, caseworkers in a public employment office have the dual roles ofcounselling and monitoring unemployed persons. These roles often conflict with each otherleading to important caseworker heterogeneity: Some consider providing services to theirclients and satisfying their demands...

This paper extends the traditional focus of active labor market policy evaluation from a staticcomparison of participation in a program versus nonparticipation (or participation in anotherprogram) to the evaluation of the effects of program sequences, i.e. multiple participation ortiming of such...

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assistcaseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour marketprogrammes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labourmarket outcome for each...

This paper examines whether contacts between caseworkers in public employment officesand employers impact on the reemployment chances of the unemployed they counsel. Thisanalysis is made possible through a large administrative dataset on unemployed combinedwith an extensive survey of...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individualearnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital.Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employedindividuals only, and employment is...

We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of West German labour market programmesby evaluating training and employment programmes that have been conducted 2000-2002after the first large reform of German labour market policy in 1998. We employ exceptionallyrich administrative data that allow...