Duration Dependence Versus Unobserved Heterogeneity in Treatment Effects: Swedish Labor Market Training and the Transition Rate to Employment

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU) is a research institute under the Swedish Ministry of Employment, situated in Uppsala. IFAU's objective is to promote, support and carry out scientific evaluations. The assignment includes: the effects of labour market policies, studies of the functioning of the labour market, the labour market effects of educational policies and the labour market effects of social insurance policies. IFAU shall also disseminate its results so that they become acces sible to different interested parties in Sweden and abroad. Terms of use: Documents inIFAU also provides funding for research projects within its areas of interest. The deadline for applications is October 1 each year. Since the researchers at IFAU are mainly economists, researchers from other disciplines are encouraged to apply for funding.IFAU is run by a Director-General. The institute has a scientific council, consisting of a chairman, the Director-General and five other members. Among other things, the scientific council proposes a decision for the allocation of research grants. A reference group including representatives for employer organizations and trade unions, as well as the ministries and authorities concerned is also connected to the institute. Papers published in the Working Paper Series should, according to the IFAU policy, have been discussed at seminars held at IFAU and at least one other academic forum, and have been read by one external and one internal referee. They need not, however, have undergone the standard scrutiny for publication in a scientific journal. The purpose of the Working Paper Series is to provide a factual basis for public policy and the public policy discussion. We analyze its causal effects on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment by ex ploiting variation in the timing of treatment and outcome, dealing with selectivity on unobservables. We demonstrate the appropriateness of this approach in our context by studying the enrollment process. We develop a model allowing for duration dependence and unobserved heterogeneity (leading to spurious duration dependence) in the treatment effect itself, and we prove non-parametric identification. The data cover the population and include multiple unemployment spells for many individu als. The results indicate a large significantly positive effect on exit to work shortly after exiting the program. The effect at the individual level diminishes after some w...

Job Creation Schemes in Turbulent Times

“…In a second step we investigate the subsequent employment stability of program participants and nonparticipants by introducing a third transition process similar to van den Berg and Vikström (2014). In addition, we estimate models allowing for a random treatment effect following Richardson and van den Berg (2013) and models with two treatments (JCSs and training), whereby we allow the probability of entering one treatment to depend on the participation in another treatment. None of these model extensions leads to different results.…”

“…We additionally allow for a random coefficient for the treatment effect similar to Richardson and van den Berg (2013). In this model, we allow both treatment effects to vary with respect to unobserved heterogeneity.…”

Cannabis use and support for cannabis legalization

“…In labor economics literature, Abbring et al (2005), Arni et al (2013) and Van Ours (2004) for example, use similar methods. Other examples are Fevang et al (2014) who analyze Norwegian absenteeism jointly modeling the flow from presence to absence and back and Richardson and van den Berg (2013) who study the effect of labor market training on the job finding rates of Swedish unemployed workers. 5 Note that the expectation about the effect of past use on opinions is not very clear.…”

Application of correspondence analysis to the identification of the influence of features of unemployed persons on the unemployment duration

“…Persons that took part in professional activation programmes have shorter duration of unemployment [Bieszk-Stolorz and Markowicz 2015a, data: Local Labour Office in Koszalin, 2011, Kaplan-Meier estimator, uncontinuous regression model], however the reverse phenomenon was observed for women in Korea [Lee and Lee 2005]. Positive effects were observed after 12 months from registration [Richardson and van den Berg 2013]. Some authors obtained results confirming that the ratio of persons deregistered because of getting work diminishes when the unemployment duration increases [Rotaru 2014;Daras and Jerzak 2005;Long 2009].…”