Public Employment Services vary widely across the world in terms of history, structures and capacities, as well as the national labor market context in which they operate. In order to meet the demands of the new world of work, comparability will be crucial to align priorities and adapt methods...

We analyze the optimal regional pattern of public employment in an information-constrained second-best redistribution policy showing that regionally differentiated public employment can serve as an expenditure side tagging device, bypassing or relaxing the equity-effciency trade-off. The optimal...

The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. Using US microdata, we show that the education bias also holds within industries and in two thirds of 3-digit occupations. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model of private and public employment based on two features....

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment in the City of Stockholm. Having access to rich high-quality individual-level administrative data, we apply dynamic inverse probability weighting, proposed by Van den Berg and...

Governments perform national, labor-intensive censuses on a regular schedule. Censuses represent many of the largest peacetime expansions and contractions in federal hiring. The predetermined occurrence and scale of the census offers an economic experiment in the effects of temporary government...