We evaluate the presence of effects from joining one of four active labour market programs in Romania in the late 1990s compared to the no-program state. Using rich survey data and propensity score matching, we find that three programs (training and retraining, small business assistance, and...

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...

The aim of this work is to assess the effectiveness of active labour market policies carried out by the Catalan Public Employment Services (SOC) during the year 2005. The results obtained from the application of matching techniques show that the probability of finding a job for an individual who...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on program evaluation. First, we construct a model that is well-suited to conduct equilibrium policy experiments and we illustrate effectiveness of general equilibrium models as tools for the evaluation of social programs. Second, we...

This paper addresses the selection of smoothing parameters for estimating the average treatment effect on the treated using matching methods. Because precise estimation of the expected counterfactual is particularly important in regions containing the mass of the treated units, we define and...

In many countries fairly large and persistent regional disparities can be observed for a variety of economic indicators. Since these disparities can not be reduced to one single dimension, a classification system is needed to give a parsimonious overview. The article presents a system which is...

This paper presents a regional case study of the labour market and its surrounding of Vinh City in central Vietnam, based on surveys conducted in 1999 and 2005. By including the time dimension and surveying samples with over 6000 individuals respectively it is possible to identify precisely the...

The search-matching model is well suited for an equilibrium evaluation of labor market policies. When those policies are targeted on some groups, the usual juxtaposition of labor markets is however a shortcoming. There is a need for a setting where workers' productivity depends on employment...

In Austria job search programs were introduced on a large scale in 1999. These programs aim at activating unemployed at an early stage and bringing them back to work by training job search related skills. We evaluate the impact of active labour market programs in Austria on individual...