Contracting out job placement services might save costs and provide a service capacity buffer in times of increasing unemployment. However, state agencies must be able to ensure a suitable balance between services and quality, and to carefully monitor and evaluate private provider outcomes....

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...

During a period, an Unemployment Fund (UF) handles members and beneficiaries, at a cost. In this, they are more or less efficient. Four optimizations indicate that the aggregate cost may be reduced by as much as 35 per cent. In the process, the inefficient UFs are identified. Moreover, the...

The aim of this study is to investigate the negative correlation between unemployment and life satisfaction in the 27 post-socialist countries. First, we measured the well-being cost of life satisfaction brought from pecuniary and non-pecuniary sources. In line with the previous literature, the...

Exploiting a district level data set on the 2007/8 post-election violence in Kenya, this paper investigates why polarization between ethnic groups results in violent conflict in some cases, but not in others. After the announcement of highly controversial election results in December 2007,...

This paper uses data from the 1996 Australian Survey of Aspects of Literacy to examine the effects on labour market outcomes of literacy, numeracy and educational attainment. The survey includes a range of literacy and numeracy variables that are highly inter-correlated. A ?general to specific?...