Evaluating the Impact of the Post-2008 Employment Subsidy Program in Turkey

Binnur Balkan, Yusuf Baskaya and Semih Tumen

No 9993, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper investigates the employment effects of a targeted subsidy scheme implemented in Turkey following the 2008 crisis. The Turkish government started a subsidy program in 2008 to generate new employment for younger men and all women, which are the relatively disadvantaged groups in the Turkish labor markets. The program puts men of age 18-29 and all women into the treatment group, while men of age 30 and above are placed into the control group. We use a nationally representative micro-level dataset and a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the causal effect of this program. On aggregate, the subsidy program seems to be ineffective in increasing the employment probabilities of those individuals in the target group. However, when heterogeneity is accounted for by dividing the treatment group into several sub-groups, we observe that the program has been notably effective on some of those sub-groups. In particular, the increase in employment probability is high for older women, while a weaker positive effect is observed for younger women and almost no effect is detected for younger men. The effect on older women is subject to further heterogeneity: the program has increased the employment probabilities of low-educated and/or low-skill older women rather than the high-educated and/or high-skill ones.

Keywords: employment subsidies; treatment effects; difference-in-differences; Turkish micro data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 H24 J21 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2016-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cwa and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9993.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Evaluating the Impact of the Post-2008 Employment Subsidy Program in Turkey (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9993

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().