European countries with poorly performing labour markets and labour market institutions conducive to high unemployment also feature considerable expenditures on active labour market policy, and such policies are emphasized by the European Union's employment strategy. However, the practice of...

The recent reform of jobs with reduced social security contributions (the so-called Minijobs) was associated with the expectation that such jobs could serve as a bridge into regular employment for unemployed workers. However, recent experiences with the reform cast substantial doubts on the...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample consists of 199 program estimates drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. In about one-half of these cases we have both a short-term impact estimate (for a...

Against the background of the current discussion on the introduction of statutory minimum wages in Germany, this paper analyzes the potential employment and fiscal effects of such a policy. Based on estimated labor demand elasticities obtained from a structural labor demand model, the empirical...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

This paper estimates causal effects of two Polish active labor market policies - Training and Intervention Works - on employment probabilities. Using data from the 18th wave of the Polish Labor Force Survey we discuss three stages of an appropriately designed matching procedure and demonstrate...

This paper assesses the dynamics of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to...

Measures of Active Labor Market Policy are widely used in European countries, but despite many econometric evaluation studies no conclusive cross- country evidence exists regarding “what program works for what target group under what (economic and institutional) circumstances?”. This paper...

This paper investigates the method of matching regarding two crucial implementation choices, the distance measure and the type of algorithm.We implement optimal full matching – a fully efficient algorithm – and present a framework for statistical inference. The implementation uses data from...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample consists of 199 program estimates drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. In about one-half of these cases we have both a short-term impact estimate (for a...