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...

This paper presents nonexperimental net impact estimates for the Adult and Dislocated Worker programs under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the primary federal job training program in the U.S, based on administrative data from 12 states, covering approximately 160,000 WIA participants and...

We estimate impacts on earnings and employment of the two primary adult workforce support and training programs under the U.S. Workforce Investment Act (WIA) using administrative data on 160,000 participants from 12 states for up to four years following program entry. We find that participants...

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...

This paper uses administrative data from Missouri to examine the sensitivity of job training program impact estimates based on alternative nonexperimental methods. In addition to simple regression adjustment, we consider Mahalanobis distance matching and a variety of methods using propensity...

Outside the U.S., little is known about the labor-market returns to vocational (or polytechnic) postsecondary education. This paper focuses on the labor-market returns to polytechnic bachelor's degrees in Finland. Using detailed administrative data, we estimate person fixed effect models to...

This paper examines the labor-market returns to a new form of postsecondary vocational education, vocational master's degrees. We use individual fixed effects models on the matched sample of students and non-students from Finland to capture any time-invariant differences across individuals....