Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of training choice, employment and wage growth, allowing for job mobility, in a world where wages depend on firm-worker matches, as well as experience and tenure and jobs take time to locate. We estimate this model on a large administrative panel data...

Parts of the Dutch tax reform 2001 are directed towards fiscal partners in a household and aim at lowering the marginal tax burden of the partner with the lowest (potential) labour income. An important goal of the reform is to increase the employment rate of these partners, which are in majority...

Each year Germany and many other developed economies spend tens of billions of Euros on active measures of employment promotion with the explicit aim of contributing to the reduction of unemployment. Yet, high unemployment has universally been a persistent problem throughout the last two...

Studies examining the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programs present findings that are mixed and sometimes at odds, in part due to research design, data, and methodological limitations of the studies. We aim to substantially improve on past approaches to estimate program effectiveness by...

A shortage of skilled labor and low female labor market participation are problems many developed countries have to face. Besides activating inactive women, one possible solution is to support the re-integration of unemployed women. Due to female-specific labor market constraints (preferences...