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...

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...

In this paper we discuss how the encouragement design used in randomized controlled trials can be extended to a setting with two treatments and one control group. Conditions to interpret the Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimates causally are stronger than in the case with only one treatment...

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...

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...

In this paper we discuss how the "encouragement design" used in randomized controlled trials can be extended to a setting with two treatments and one control group. Conditions to interpret the Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimates causally are stronger than in the case with only one treatment...

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...

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...

Most welfare programs generate high marginal tax rates on labor income. This paper uses a representative sample of individua ls on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary gains to employment for welfare recipients. This is based on the...

In this paper, we estimate the difference in long-run after-tax and transfer income from employment and from non-employment available in January 1998 to families in France that received the Guaranteed Minimum Income (RMI) in December 1996. Based on estimated wages we compute potential increases...