In the German unemployment insurance system, Integration Agreements (IA) are mandatory contracts between the employment agency and the unemployed, jointly signed by the latter and the caseworker. IAs stipulate rights and obligations but are generally perceived as instruments to control search...

We investigate the effectiveness of three different job-search and training programmes for German long-term unemployed persons. On the basis of an extensive administrative data set, we evaluated the effects of those programmes on various levels of aggregation using Causal Machine Learning. We...

Integration Agreement (IA) are contracts between the employment agency and the unemployed, nudging the latter to comply with rules on search behavior. We designed and implemented an RCT involving thousands of newly unemployed workers, randomizing at the individual level both the timing of the IA...

To address the problem of high reservation wages among older unemployed individuals, a German targeted wage support program aimed at providing incentives to accept lower paid wage offers. We sent out information brochures on this program to randomly selected eligible men. The treatment...

Expenditures on job placement and related services make up a substantial share of many countries’ GDP. Contracting out to private providers is often proposed as a more efficient alternative to the state provision of placement services. However, the responsible state agency has to design and...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the in-dividual wages is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital. Esti-mating these effects is complicated because we observe wages only for employed individuals, and employment is itself an...

Der Beitrag gibt einen ergebnisorientierten Überblick über den Stand der Evaluation der aktiven Arbeitsmarktpolitik in Deutschland. Die Befunde weisen darauf hin, dass keine der bisherigen Instrumentengruppen überflüssig ist. Die meisten Maßnahmen können die Beschäftigungschancen...

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

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...