Give it Another Try: What are the Effects of a Public Employment Scheme Especially Designed for Hard-to-Place Workers?

Tobias Brändle () and Lukas Fervers

No 129, IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW)

Abstract: Job creation schemes (JCSs) have for a long time been considered to function as stepping stone into the labour market for unemployed workers. However, previous research has shown that public job creation schemes have mostly negative effects on the employment outcomes of participants, probably due to strong lock-in effects, which are particularly strong for unemployed workers with higher labour market attachment. This raises the question of whether JCSs could be an effective policy tool for very-hard-to-place workers who have very low job chances anyway. We contribute to this discussion by analysing a JCS that employs a special selection mechanism to identify these workers. Relying on a combination of administrative data and survey data, we employ radius-matching with regression adjustment to estimate treatment effects. Our results indicate that the effects are still negative but weaker than the ones reported in previous studies. Furthermore, we point to effect heterogeneity with regard to contract duration which suggests that the results are more optimistic for shorter contracts. Finally, we show that the results are sensitive to the inclusion of survey variables, even if high quality administrative data are available.

Keywords: active labour market programme; job creation scheme; public employment programme; propensity score matching; employability; integrated employment biographies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J18 J24 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2017-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaw.edu/RePEc/iaw/pdf/iaw_dp_129.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iaw:iawdip:129

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAW Discussion Papers from Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rolf Kleimann ().