The Microeconometric Estimation of Treatment Effects An Overview The need to evaluate the performance of active labour market policies is not questioned any longer. Even though OECD countries spend significant shares of national resources on these measures, unemployment rates remain high or even increase. We focus on microeconometric evaluation which has to solve the fundamental evaluation prob...

Start-Ups by the Unemployed: Characteristics, Survival and Direct Employment Effects Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become an increasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are being supported by various governmental programs. Potential benefits include not only the end of unemployment for the new entrepreneur but also some fu...

Do the Unemployed Become Successful Entrepreneurs? A Comparison between the Unemployed, Inactive and Wage-Earners In many countries unemployed people are helped to become self-employed. Selfemployment, however, does not necessarily lead to success. Many leave self-employment after a short period and the economic outcome varies greatly. It is important to learn more about the economic outcome fo...

This paper investigates the impact of the unemployment insurance (UI) entrance requirement on employment duration in Sweden. I study employment spells in 1992, 1996, and 1998 to find behavioural adjustments in the timing of job separation. The results suggest that some adjustments have occurred. Comparisons between years with different UI requirements support the conclusion. By using predicted ...

Many workers believe personal contacts are crucial for obtaining jobs in high-wage sectors. On the other hand, firms in high-wage sectors report using employee referrals to screen and monitor new employees. This paper develops a matching model that can explain the link between inter-industry wage differentials and employee referrals. Referrals lower monitoring costs because high-effort referees...

The Employment Effects of Job Creation Schemes in Germany: A Microeconometric Evaluation In this paper we evaluate the employment effects of job creation schemes on the participating individuals in Germany. Job creation schemes are a major element of active labour market policy in Germany and are targeted at long-term unemployed and other hard-to-place individuals. Access to very informative ad...

What Did All the Money Do? On the General Ineffectiveness of Recent West German Labour Market Programmes We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of West German labour market programmes by evaluating training and employment programmes that have been conducted 2000-2002 after the first large reform of German labour market policy in 1998. We employ exceptionally rich administrative data that ...

Determinants of Immigrants’ Cash-Welfare Benefits Intake in Spain Much of the literature on immigrants’ cash-welfare benefits use has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with well established Welfare states. This paper contributes to this literature by analyzing differences in cash-welfare benefits receipt between immigrants and natives and their determinants...

As a response to an overall high and persistent unemployment rate during the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, the German Federal Employment Agency underwent several reforms. One of the most important reforms, the reform of the organisational structure of the Federal Employment Agency, comprised an adjustment of the business model and a reorganisation of placement processes. From 2...

An Economic Analysis of Exclusion Restrictions for Instrumental Variable Estimation Instrumental variable estimation requires untestable exclusion restrictions. With policy effects on individual outcomes, there is typically a time interval between the moment the agent realizes that he may be exposed to the policy and the actual exposure or the announcement of the actual treatment status. In suc...