An important concern about the surge in the number of refugees arriving in Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian federal state to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the...

There is no simple answer to the question of the potential impact of migration on EU society. EU migration policy is expected to meet the requirements of economic and social policy, in particular of the Lisbon Agenda, as well as national cultural, political, strategic and security imperatives....

There is still a lack of knowledge on how to effectively help the long-term unemployed into employment. We evaluate a wide range of active labour market policies for this target group, using a dynamic matching approach. Measures vary considerably in the extent to which they improve labour market...

We analysed a new counselling and support programme for people with low employment prospects in Austria. The Austrian Public Employment Service introduced regional pilots to investigate whether a new counselling strategy could improve labour market outcomes for this group. Eligible unemployed...

Many European countries are facing the key challenge of integrating low-skilled jobless young people into the labour market. From 2018 to 2020, the Public Employment Service (PES) in Vienna tested a new model of intensified support ("case management"). The target group consisted of young...

In a randomised controlled trial in Austria, lower caseloads in public employment offices led to more meetings of the unemployed with their caseworkers, more job offers, more program assignments, and more sanctions for noncompliance with job search requirements. More intensive counselling led to...

In this paper we propose a Bayesian estimation approach for a spatial autoregressive logit specification. Our approach relieson recent advances in Bayesian computing, making use of Pólya-Gamma sampling for Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo algorithms.The proposed specification assumes that the...