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...

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...

We study immigrants in temporary employment agencies in Sweden using a unique data set that covers all aged 16-64 who were employed by temporary employment agencies (TEAs) in Sweden in November 1999, with information on their employment status in 1998 and 2000. We find that young people, women,...

We investigate the allocation of unemployed individuals to different subprograms within Swiss active labour market policy by the caseworkers at local employment offices in Switzerland in 1998. We are particularly interested in whether the caseworkers allocate the unemployed to services in ways...

Between 1991 and 1997 West Germany spent on average about 3.6 bn Euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed. We base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching...

We model how unemployment benefit sanctions - benefit reductions that are imposed if unemployed do not comply with job search guidelines - affect unemployment. In our analysis we find that not only micro effects concerning the behavior of individual unemployed workers are relevant, but also...

In diesem Beitrag wird ein vom Bundesministerium für Arbeit bezuschusstes Modellprojekt – die Mannheimer Arbeitsvermittlungsagentur (MAVA) – mit Hilfe von Matching-Methoden untersucht. In der MAVA arbeiten Mitarbeiter des Sozial- und Arbeitsamts eng bei der Vermittlung arbeitsfähiger...

Using Portuguese data, this paper investigates the effects of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and of job-finding methods on earnings. The effectiveness of the job search process is also evaluated in terms of the periodicity of the resulting job match. Emphasis is accorded...

We investigate the effect of counseling and monitoring on the individual transition rate to employment. We theoretically analyze these policies in a job search model with two search channels and endogenous search effort. In the empirical analysis we use unique administrative and survey data...

Studies examining the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programs present findings that are mixed and sometimes at odds, in part due to research design, data, and methodological limitations of the studies. We aim to substantially improve on past approaches to estimate program effectiveness by...