The Effectiveness of Public Sponsored Training Revisited: The Importance of Data and Methodological Choices

Martin Biewen, Bernd Fitzenberger, Aderonke Osikominu and Marie Paul

No 2012-09, NRN working papers from The Austrian Center for Labor Economics and the Analysis of the Welfare State, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: As the first, substantive contribution, this paper revisits the effectiveness of two widely used public sponsored training programs, the first one focusing on intensive occupational training and the second one on short-term activation and job entry. We use an exceptionally rich administrative data set for Germany to estimate their employment and earnings effects in the early 2000s. We employ a stratified propensity score matching approach to address dynamic selection into heterogeneous programs. As a second, methodological contribution, we carefully assess to what extent various aspects of our empirical strategy such as conditioning flexibly on employment and benefit histories, the availability of rich personal information, handling of later program participations, and further methodological and specification choices affect estimation results. Our results imply pronounced negative lock-in effects in the short run in general and positive medium-run effects on employment and earnings when job-seekers enroll after having been unemployed for some time. We find that data and specification issues can have a large effect on impact estimates.

Keywords: public sponsored training; dynamic treatment effects; multiple treatments; kernel matching; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 H43 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jku:nrnwps:2012_09

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