This paper evaluates the impact on the transition to work of a policy reform in Belgium that restricted the access to a specific unemployment insurance scheme for young labor market entrants. This scheme entitles youths with no or little labor market experience to unemployment benefits after a...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

A dynamic discrete choice model is set up to estimate the effects of grade retention in high school, both in the short-run (end-of-year evaluation) and in the long-run (drop-out and delay). In contrast to other evaluation approaches, this model captures essential treatment heterogeneity and...

Following massive take-up rates during the COVID-19 period, short-time work (STW) policies have attracted renewed interest. In this paper, we take stock of this policy instrument and provide a critical review of STW systems in Europe. We focus on the objectives of STW programs and their primary...

We evaluate the impact of hiring subsidies for unemployed jobseekers in Wallonia, the Frenchspeaking region in the south of Belgium. The special feature of these subsidies is that they are more readily available for low-educated youths, who are eligible from registration as a jobseeker or a few...