Building in an Evaluation Component for Active Labor Market Programs: A Practitioner's Guide
David Card,
Pablo Ibarraran () and
Juan Villa
No 6085, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP’s, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is randomly divided into a treatment and a control group. Random assignment ensures that the two groups would have had similar experiences in the post-program period in the absence of the program intervention. The observed post-program difference therefore yields a reliable estimate of the program impact. The second approach is a difference in differences design that compares the change in outcomes between the participant group and a selected comparison group from before to after the completion of the program. In general the outcomes of the comparison group may differ from the outcomes of the participant group, even in the absence of the program intervention. If the difference observed prior to the program would have persisted in the absence of the program, however, then the change in the outcome gap between the two groups yields a reliable estimate of the program impact. This guideline reviews the various steps in the design and implementation of ALMP’s, and in subsequent analysis of the program data, that will ensure a rigorous and informative impact evaluation using either of these two techniques.
Keywords: active labor market programs; policy evaluation; randomized trials; difference in difference; average treatment effect on the treated; development effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C93 H43 I38 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6085.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Building in an Evaluation Component for Active Labor Market Programs: A Practitioner's Guide (2011) 
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:dp6085
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 ().