Start-Up Subsidies in East Germany: Finally, a Policy that Works? The German government has spent between 7bn and 11bn Euro per year on active labor market policies (ALMP) in East Germany in the last decade. The effectiveness of the most important programs (in terms of participants and spending) such as job-creation schemes and vocational training has been evaluated quite thoroughly in recent y...

Income Support Policies for Part-Time Workers: A Stepping-Stone to Regular Jobs? An Application to Young Long-Term Unemployed Women in Belgium We verify whether an income support policy for part-time workers in Belgium increases the transition from unemployment to non-subsidised, “regular” employment. Using a sample of 8630 long-term unemployed young women, whose labour market history is observ...

Labour Market Regulation in the EU-15: Causes and Consequences – A Survey Why should floors be set under wages and working conditions by labour market regulations? This paper finds that efficiency arguments are questionable, because of the disemployment effects of strict regulation. Regulation is better explained in terms of the choices of the employed semiand unskilled worker group. This group...

How Do Layoff Costs Affect Employment? General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labor reallocation, whereas negative effects come through reducing the pri...

This study examines the effect of a community-based work experience program Work for the Dole (WfD) on transitions out of unemployment in Australia. To evaluate the WfD program a quasi-experimental exact matching approach is applied. Justification for the matching approach is a ‘natural experiment’ limits on WfD project funding that it is argued constituted a source of random assignment to the ...

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Early Meetings and Activation We analyze the effects of four randomized social experiments, involving early and intensive active labour market policy, conducted in Denmark in 2008. The experiments entailed different combinations of early and intensive treatment in terms of meetings and active labour market programmes. The effects are remarkable; frequent ...

Starting in January 2003, Germany implemented the first two socalled Hartz reforms, followed by the third and fourth packages of Hartz reforms in January 2004 and January 2005, respectively. The aim of these reforms was to accelerate labor market flows and reduce unemployment duration. Without attempting to evaluate the specific components of these Hartz reforms, this paper provides a first att...

This article examines the effects of the federal Prison Industry Enhancement Certificate Program (PIE) on unemployment duration, length of employment, and earnings of inmates released between 1996 and 2001 across 5 states. This is the first nationally representative dataset of PIE and this is the first comprehensive study to analyze the effect of this program on labor market outcomes of the inm...

Targeting Labour Market Programmes: Results from a Randomized Experiment We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assist caseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour market programmes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labour market outcome for each programme and thereby suggested a...

The Effects of Vocational Training Programmes on the Duration of Unemployment in Eastern Germany This paper focuses on the effects of vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany. We use information from administrative data of the Federal Employment Office. To allow for observable and possible unobservable influences we apply a multivariate mixed proportiona...