The paper evaluates the differential performance of the six main types of Swedish programmes that were available to adult unemployed workers en Titled to unemployment benefits in the 1990s: labour market training, workplace introduction, work experience placement, relief work, trainee...

Mit Arbeitsgelegenheiten in der Mehraufwandsvariante (AGH-MAE, auch: Ein-Euro-Jobs oder Zusatzjobs) sollen nach der Vorstellung des Gesetzgebers erwerbsfähige Leistungsberechtigte im SGB II gefördert werden, die mit anderen Mitteln nicht (mehr) in reguläre Beschäftigung integriert werden...

Further vocational training for the unemployed aims at enhancing their job prospects. This paper analyses the effectiveness of such subsidized training programmes for means-tested unemployment benefit recipients in Germany. The empirical findings are based on rich administrative data of the...

Propensity Score Matching (PSM) has become a popular approach to estimate causal treatment effects. It is widely applied when evaluating labour market policies, but empirical examples can be found in very diverse fields of study. Once the researcher has decided to use PSM, he is confronted with...

Our paper estimates the average effect of wage subsidies - paid to employers for a limited period of time - on the labour market prospects of needy job-seekers without access to insurance-paid 'unemployment benefit I'. The results show that wage subsidies had large and significant favourable...

Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

For Germany, we analyse the (relative) effects of participation in several active labour market programmes on the employment prospects of participants. First, our results show that different matching algorithms result in different severe problems of common support. Second, we obtain favourable...

Our paper investigates the relative effects of wage subsidies and further vocational training on the subsequent employment prospects of previously unemployed program participants. First, we outline a theoretical approach based on a firm's hiring decision. For the relative effectiveness of both...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

The aim of this work is to assess the effectiveness of active labour market policies carried out by the Catalan Public Employment Services (SOC) during the year 2005. The results obtained from the application of matching techniques show that the probability of finding a job for an individual who...