Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms

Fredrik Andersson, Harry Holzer, Julia I. Lane, David Rosenblum and Jeffrey Smith

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We study the job training provided under the US Workforce Investment Act (WIA) to adults and dislocated workers in two states. Our substantive contributions center on impacts estimated non-experimentally using administrative data. These impacts compare WIA participants who do and do not receive training. In addition to the usual impacts on earnings and employment, we link our state data to the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) data at the US Census Bureau, which allows us to estimate impacts on the characteristics of the firms at which participants find employment. We find moderate positive impacts on employment, earnings and desirable firm characteristics for adults, but not for dislocated workers. Our primary methodological contribution consists of assessing the value of the additional conditioning information provided by the LEHD relative to the data available in state Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings records. We find that value to be zero.

Keywords: job training; active labor market program; program evaluation; Workforce Investment Act; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J08 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 99 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ias and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2018/CES-WP-18-02.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Federally Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms (2024)
Working Paper: Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Non-experimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms (2016)
Working Paper: Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms (2013)
Working Paper: Does Federally-Funded Job Training Work? Nonexperimental Estimates of WIA Training Impacts Using Longitudinal Data on Workers and Firms (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:18-02

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