In this paper we explore the responses of a group of long-term unemployed men to chronic labour market insecurity and ‘active’ labour market policies promoting individual responsibility for employability. We draw from an evaluation of a recent pilot scheme: the UK Employment Retention and...

The methodological review is the second part of the evaluation research commissioned by the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in 2005 to help in the preparation of the evaluation of the Working for Families (WFF) programme. This review enumerates the key evaluation questions identified by MSD...

This article presents a cost-benefit analysis of Britain's Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which was evaluated through the first large-scale randomized control trial in the UK. ERA used a combination of job coaching and financial incentives in attempting to help...

Background: The United Kingdom Employment Retention and Advancement (U.K. ERA) demonstration was the largest and most comprehensive social experiment ever conducted in the United Kingdom. It examined the extent to which a combination of postemployment advisory support and financial incentives...

Benefit-cost analysis is used extensively in the evaluation of social programs. Often, the success or failure of these programs is judged on the basis of whether the calculated net benefits to society are positive or negative. Almost all existing benefit-cost studies of social programs count...

Government-funded training programs in the United States have often been subject to rigorous evaluation. Indeed, many of these programs have been evaluated with random assignment, although sophisticated quasi-experimental methods have also been used. Until very recently, however, there has been...

This article examines past evaluations of government training programs for the economically disadvantaged and offers an agenda for future research. It is found that government training programs are producing modest increases in earnings for adult men and women, but are probably not producing...

This paper applies meta-analytic techniques to evaluations of voluntary training programs to investigate whether impacts of government-funded training programs on earnings grow or deteriorate over time. For adult men and youth, we find some evidence that, after initially increasing, earnings...

This paper uses data from the age 33 wave of the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS) to analyze the effects of a parental disruption (divorce or death of a father) on the labour market performance of children when they reach adulthood. The NCDS is a longitudinal study of all...

This study uses meta-analysis to synthesize findings from 31 evaluations of 15 voluntary government-funded training programs for the disadvantaged that operated between 1964 and 1998. On average, the earnings effects of the evaluated programs seem to have been largest for women, quite modest for...