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...

In many countries, caseworkers in a public employment office have the dual roles of counselling and monitoring unemployed persons. These roles often conflict with each other leading to important caseworker heterogeneity: Some consider providing services to their clients and satisfying their...

This paper examines whether the chances of job placements improve if unemployed persons are counselled by caseworkers who belong to the same social group, defined by gender, age, education, and nationality. Based on an unusually informative dataset, which links Swiss unemployed to their...

This paper makes two contributions to the empirical matching literature. First, a recent study by Anderson and Burgess (2000) testing for endogenous competition among job seekers in a matching frame-work, is replicated with a richer and more accurate data set for Germany. Their results are...

This paper deals with empirical matching functions. The paper is innovative in several ways. First, unlike in most of the existing literature, matching functions are estimated not only on aggregate, but also on disaggregate levels which is unusual due to the scarcity of appropriate data....

We analyse the effects of government-sponsored training for the unemployed conducted during East German transition. For the microeconometric analysis, we use a new, large and informative administrative database that allows us to use matching methods to reduce potential selection bias, to study...

Using exceptionally rich linked administrative and survey information on German welfare recipients we investigate the health effects of transitions from welfare to employment and of assignments to welfare-to-work programmes. Applying semi-parametric propensity score matching estimators we find...