We study the returns to apprenticeship and vocational training for three early labor market outcomes all measured at age 25 for East and West German youths: non-employment (i.e., unemployment or out of the labor force), permanent fulltime employment, and wages. We find strong positive effects of...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

Training programs for the unemployed typically involve teaching specific skills in demand amongst employers. In 1997, Swedish unemployed could also choose general training at the upper secondary school level. Despite the dominance of programs offering specific training, long-term relative...

During the 2001-8 period, the employment rate of people with a disability remained remarkably low in most western economies, hardly responding to better macroeconomic conditions and favourable anti-discrimination legislation and interventions. Continuing health and productivity improvements in...

In all Mediterranean countries youth unemployment has reached alarming record levels. This paper analyses the current situation in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. In all countries school dropout rates are high, returns to education are low and the transition from education to work is...

We use a randomized experiment to evaluate a large-scale active labor market policy: Turkey's vocational training programs for the unemployed. A detailed follow-up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average...

This paper presents the treatment effects from participating in a subsidized vocational training program targeted at women residing in low-income households in India. We combine pre-intervention data with two rounds of post-intervention data from a randomized field experiment to quantify the 6-...

By conventional statistics, youth unemployment seems to be quite moderate in Korea: ‘only’ 9.6 percent of the ‘active’ youth labour force was unemployed compared to 21.4 percent in EU-27 in 2011. Germany, with a youth unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, is one of the very few European...