Workfare for the old and long-term unemployed

Helge Bennmarker, Oskar Skans and Ulrika Vikman

Labour Economics, 2013, vol. 25, issue C, 25-34

Abstract: We estimate the effects of conditioning benefits on program participation among older long-term unemployed workers. We exploit a Swedish reform which reduced UI duration from 90 to 60weeks for a group of older unemployed workers in a setting where workers who exhausted their benefits received unchanged transfers if they agreed to participate in a work practice program. Our results show that job finding increased as a result of the shorter duration of passive benefits. The time profile of the job-finding effects suggests that the results are due to deterrence during the program-entry phase. We find no impact on ensuing job durations or wages, suggesting that the increased job-finding rate was driven by increased search intensity rather than lower reservation wages. A crude cost–benefit analysis suggests that the reform reduced the combined cost of programs and transfers.

Keywords: Activation; Program evaluation; UI; Duration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J26 J64 J65 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092753711300050X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Workfare for the old and long-term unemployed (2012)
Working Paper: Workfare for the old and long-term unemployed (2012)
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:eee:labeco:v:25:y:2013:i:c:p:25-34

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2013.04.008

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().