Skills are a central source of high productivity and economic well-being. But what do we mean by productive skills? Both with regard to measurement and policy, the primary focus in the U.S. has been on academic skills, as measured by tests of reading, writing and math abilities and by...

This paper characterizes the labor market of youth in Colombia from 2008 to 2017. We estimate labor market indicators for individuals aged between 14 and 28 years using microdata from Colombia's household surveys over the study period. Our estimates document the main patterns and trends in the...

Activation policies aimed at getting working-age people off benefits and into work have become a buzzword in labour market policies. Yet they are defined and implemented differently across OECD countries, and their success rates vary too. The Great Recession has posed a severe stress test for...

This note examines the balance of activation strategies in OECD countries, where this type of policy approach has a long tradition. Countries share the objective of strengthening employment and reducing benefit dependency and vulnerability among the working-age population, but the balance of...

This paper examines the role of non-wage cost rigidities in slowing down employment creation by assessing the effect of a policy aimed at fostering employment for women and young men introduced in Turkey in 2008. Exploiting a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, I assess the...

This review discusses empirical studies on hiring subsidies in the private sector and on schemes directly providing usually public or non-profit sector jobs for the unemployed in Germany. An important effect of hiring subsidies is that they stabilise employment. For employment schemes, results...

Hiring subsidies are widely used to create (stable) employment for the long-term unemployed. This paper exploits the abolition of a hiring subsidy targeted at long-term unemployed jobseekers older than 45 years of age in Belgium to evaluate its effectiveness in the short and medium run. Based on...

This paper takes a closer look at Tunisia’s SIVP: an employment subsidy aimed at university graduates and, until recently, the country’s largest active labour market policy. Using a tracer survey of the 2004 graduating cohort, OLS and matching techniques are applied to estimate the...

This paper examines the effectiveness of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in improving labour market outcomes, especially of low-skilled individuals, by means of a pooled cross-country and time series database for 31 advanced countries during the period 1985–2010. The analysis includes...

Since the economic crisis in 2008, European youth unemployment rates have been persistently high at around 20% on average. The majority of European countries spends significant resources each year on active labor market programs (ALMP) with the aim of improving the integration prospects of...