Benchmarking regions: Estimating the counterfactual distribution of labor market outcomes

Bernd Fitzenberger and Marina Furdas

No 12-023, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: This paper develops and implements a new benchmarking approach for labor market regions. Based on panel data for regions, we use nonparametric matching techniques to account for observed labor market characteristics and for spatial proximity. As the benchmark, we estimate the counterfactual distribution of labor market outcomes for a region based on outcomes of similar regions. This allows to measure both the rank (relative performance) and the absolute performance based on the actual outcome for a region. Our outcome variable of interest is the hiring rate among the unemployed. We implement different similarity measures to account for differences in labor market conditions and spatial proximity, and we choose the tuning parameters in our matching approach based on a cross-validation procedure. The results show that both observed labor market characteristics and spatial proximity are important features to successfully match regions. Specifically, the modified Zhao (2004) distance measure and geographic distance in logs work best in our applications. Our estimated performance measures remain quite stable over time.

Keywords: matching function; regional employment offices; performance measurement; nonparametric matching; conditional quantile positions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 J68 R50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/57185/1/690110170.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Benchmarking Regions: Estimating the Counterfactual Distribution of Labor Market Outcomes (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:zbw:zewdip:12023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().