This paper assesses the matching efficiency of the Portuguese public employment service, applying Data Envelopment Analysis combined with principal component analysis to Portuguese administrative data and comparing the situations in June 1998 and June 2001. We find evidence that the Portuguese...

The Recent German research has suggested that extending the number of caseworkers may have a very positive effect on PES performance. The present paper accepts this key insight but argues that there are other factors that may independently drive outcomes and in particular local agents’...

This paper provides a general equilibrium evaluation of the Employment Service, also known as the Public Labor Exchange (PLX), a national program which facilitates meetings between job seekers and vacancies. The paper departs from the partial equilibrium framework of previous evaluations by...

The first part of the text is devoted to an assessment of the influence of the introduction of performance contracts in the Public Employment Service (PES) in France. It shows that this management technique (“contractualism”) had a very marginal impact in the period considered (1990-2003)....

There is still a lack of knowledge on how to effectively help the long-term unemployed into employment. We evaluate a wide range of active labour market policies for this target group, using a dynamic matching approach. Measures vary considerably in the extent to which they improve labour market...