Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

This paper evaluates the UK New Deal for Lone Parents (NDLP) program, which aims to return lone parents to work. Using rich administrative data on benefit receipt histories and a selection on observed variables identification strategy, we find that the program modestly reduces benefit receipt...

We use the nation-wide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in India. Using primary survey data, we find more program...

There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest...

A number of developing country governments have introduced ambitious anti-poverty programs in recent years, but the dynamic effects of these initiatives on governments' election performance remain poorly understood. Especially in contexts with low program implementation quality, public support...

We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive...

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not...

In this paper, we suggest a novel approach to program evaluation that allows identification of the causal effect of a training program on the likelihood of being invited to a job interview under weak assumptions. The idea is to measure the program-effects by pre- and posttreatment data that are...

We analyse the effects of active social policy (ASP) on the dynamics of welfare dependence. We evaluate the impact of various ASP measures (employment and training) on the duration of welfare spells and subsequent employment spells, based on data from Denmark. The results show that employment...

The paper investigates the demographic alternatives for dealing with the projected population aging and low or negative growth of the population and labor force in the North. Without further immigration, the total labor force in Europe and Russia, the high-income countries of East Asia and the...