The public employment service (PES) makes use in many countries of vacancy referrals as to facilitate the matching between unemployed workers and vacancies. Based on a “timing-of-events” approach to control for selective participation, this study evaluates whether this policy instrument...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of contracting out mandatory publicly provided counselling and training for long-term unemployed in Flanders (Belgium) to private for-profit and non-profit organisations (FPOs and NPOs). A multivariate transition model exploits timing-of-events and novel...

The Article presents an argument for reclassifying and regulating commercial staffing agencies, most importantly the temporary help staffing agency. We conclude that a new legal status for profit-driven labor market intermediaries (LMIs) is essential to building a regulatory regime that can end...

This paper evaluates a job search assistance program for unemployment insurance recipients. The assignment to the program is dynamic. We provide a discussion on dynamic treatment effects and identification conditions. In the empirical analyses we use administrative data from a unique...

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...

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...

The objective of this paper is to re-evaluate the effect of the 1985 Employment Services for Ex-Offenders (ESEO) program on recidivism in San Diego, Chicago and Boston. The initial group of program participants was split randomly in a control group and a treatment group. The actual treatment...

In the last decade the European Employment Strategy strongly recommended reforms of active labour market policies, reforms that have generated a spread of evaluation exercises for most of European countries. This paper fills the gap in the literature concerning the Italian case, assessing the...

This paper compares the effectiveness of public and private providers of employment services. Reporting from a randomized field experiment conducted in Denmark we assess empirically the case for contracting out employment services for a well-defined group of highly educated job-seekers...