Courses or individual counselling: does job search assistance work?

Abstract

How does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long-term unemployed people? We investigate whether job search assistance (JSA) helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal. To evaluate individual employment effects, we apply a quasi-experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods. We compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly. Our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the German Federal Employment Agency. When comparing participants to nonparticipants, results suggest that the individual JSA does not affect participants' employment prospects at all and that the course JSA even decreased their employment chances. At the same time, differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants. Therefore, we compare both programmes directly to each other, that is, we use the other programme participants as a comparison group, respectively. We found some evidence that individual JSA performs better than course JSA.

Ready to work (yet)? Unemployment trajectories among vulnerable welfare recipients

“…The existing research within the field reveals a great skewing, favouring a range of quantitative outcome measure and a linear understanding of causality, which fails to address the dynamic effects of ALMP and rarely takes into account the diversity of the clients being served and the variety of challenges they confront. Thus, the majority of the research has focused on measuring or evaluating the effects of specific activation programmes (Arni et al., 2009; Bernhard and Kopf, 2014) or determining the policy delivery processes in social interactions between clients and social work professionals (Behncke et al., 2008; Caswell and Larsen, 2015; Hall et al., 2003). However, understanding employability from the clients’ perspective – through their interpretations and actions – is underreported (Gubrium, 2016; Olesen and Eskelinen, 2011).…”

Fairness in Algorithmic Profiling: A German Case Study

“…In Germany, profiling for supporting the unemployed was introduced as a major strategy in labor market policy during the course of the fundamental labor market reforms of 2002-2005. Triggered by high unemployment rates paired with a high share of longtime unemployment (up to 50% in the early 2000s), the timely activation of unemployed welfare recipients with the goal of re-integrating them into the labor market to avoid LTU was identified as a main objective of the reforms (Bernhard and Kopf, 2014). As a consequence, the public employment service of Germany, the Federal Employment Agency, developed a strategy to combat long-term unemployment by following recommendations of the OECD regarding the minimization of the number of unemployed individuals who drift into long periods of unemployment.…”

Hvordan antages kommunale beskæftigelsesprojekter at virke?

“…fi nder Crépon et al (2016) effekt af jobsøgningsindsatser, men begraenset effekt af traeningsindsatser. Derimod viser andre studier negative effekter af jobsøgningsindsatser (Bernhard & Kopf, 2014;Cottier, Flückiger Kempeneers & Lalive, 2018). Caliendo, Mahlstedt & Mitnik (2017) fi nder ingen beskaeftigelseseffekt af hverken korte eller lange kurser efter 30 måneder.…”