Active labor market policies are massively used with the objective being to improve labor market outcomes of individuals out of work. Many observational evaluation studies have been published. In this review, we critically assess policy effectiveness. We emphasize insights from recent randomized...

We use longitudinal individual wage, hours, and employment data to investigate the effect of the February 1, 1982 mandatory reduction of weekly working hours in France. Just after François Mitterrand's election in May 1981, the government decided to increase the minimum wage by 5%. Then, as...

The randomized trial literature has helped to renew the fields of microeconometric policy evaluation by emphasizing identification issues raised by endogenous program participation. Measurement and attrition issues have perhaps received less attention. This paper analyzes the dramatic impact of...

We propose a novel selectivity correction procedure to deal with survey attrition, at the crossroads of the "Heckit" and of the bounding approach of Lee (2009). As a substitute for the instrument needed in sample selectivity correction models, we use information on the number of attempts that...

Contracting out public services to private firms has ambiguous effects when quality is imperfectly observable. Using a randomized experiment over a national sample in France, we compare the efficiency of the public employment service (PES) vs. private providers in delivering very similar...

Econometric evaluations of public-sponsored training programmes generally find little evidence of an impact of such policies on transition rates out of unemployment. We perform the first evaluation of training effects for the unemployed adults in France, exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset...

This article evaluates the effects of intensive counseling schemes that are provided to about 20% of the unemployed since the 2001 French unemployment policy reform (PARE). Several of the schemes are dedicated at improving the quality of assignment of workers to jobs. As a result, it is...