This paper analyzes the impact of participation in job creation schemes (JCSs) on job search outcomes in the context of the turbulent East German labor market in the aftermath of the German reunification. High job destruction characterized the economic environment. JCSs were heavily used in...

Integration Agreement (IA) are contracts between the employment agency and the unemployed, nudging the latter to comply with rules on search behavior. We designed and implemented an RCT involving thousands of newly unemployed workers, randomizing at the individual level both the timing of the IA...

Women without work after childbirth are at risk of losing their connection to the labor market. However, they may participate in adult education programs. We analyze the effect of this on the duration to work and on the wage rate, by applying conditional difference-in-differences approaches. We...

Public Employment Service (PES) agencies and caseworkers (CW) often have substantial leeway in the design and implementation of active labor market policies (ALMP) for the unemployed, resulting in variation in the intensity of usage per policy. This paper presents a novel framework in which this...

Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante...

This paper uses a large-scale two-level randomized experiment to study direct and displacement effects of job search assistance. Our findings show that the assistance reduces unemployment among the treated, but also creates substantial displacement leading to higher unemployment for the...

How do caseworkers affect job finding and what characterizes a productive caseworker? To answer these questions we exploit variation coming from the fact that many local employment offices in Sweden assign job seekers to caseworkers based on their date of birth. We couple this identification...

We study the anatomy of responses to a major activation programme targeted at unemployed youth, introduced in Sweden in 2007. We use a regression discontinuity design to analyse individual reactions to the programme. We find that individuals who have a relatively high predicted probability of...

The rising numbers of young people with disability pension concerns many advanced economies. We present results from a comparative analysis of Sweden and Norway, two countries which are very similar in many respects, but differ regarding the policy mix to enhance the employability of the work...

According to search and matching theory, a greater availability of unemployed workers should make it easier for a firm to fill a vacancy but more vacancies at other firms should make recruitment more difficult. But what can we say about the expected magnitudes of these effects on firms’...