Active labor market policies are massively used with the objective being to improve labor market outcomes of individuals out of work. Many observational evaluation studies have been published. In this review, we critically assess policy effectiveness. We emphasize insights from recent randomized...

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...

When treatments may occur at different points in time, most evaluation methods assume - implicitly or explicitly - that all the information used by subjects about the occurrence of a future treatment is available to the researcher. This is often called the no anticipation assumption. In reality,...

This paper implements a method to identify and estimate treatment effects in a dynamic setting where treatments may occur at any point in time. By relating the standard matching approach to the timing-of-events approach, it demonstrates that effects of the treatment on the treated at a given...

We assess whether imperfect knowledge of labor regulation hinders job creation at small and medium-sized firms. We partner with a labor law expert that provides information about labor regulation via newsletters and access to a specialized website. We randomly assign 1800 firms to get access to...

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...

When treatments may occur at different points in time, most evaluation methods assume – implicitly or explicitly – that all the information used by subjects about the occurrence of a future treatment is available to the researcher. This is often called the “no anticipation” assumption....