The Effects of Employment Counseling on Labor Market Outcomes for Adults and Dislocated Workers: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Experiment

Abstract

This article examines the effects of “intensive services” provided by the Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, two of the largest employment service programs in the United States. Intensive services include one‐on‐one staff assistance—assessments, coaching, career counseling, and service referrals. The study was a randomized controlled trial conducted in 28 randomly selected sites, with the randomization of job seekers to research groups with or without access to intensive services, yielding study findings with both internal and external validity. Using survey and administrative earnings data, we find that access to intensive services increased earnings by between 7 and 20 percent over a three‐year follow‐up period; these benefits exceed program costs from the perspective of both taxpayers and society as a whole. Although impacts were larger for more educated job seekers and in areas with higher rates of unemployment, impacts were similar across many other subgroups, including for adults compared with dislocated workers.

Evaluation of Impacts of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program

“…DOL could take a proper sample of sites/states and construct a pooled estimate. This was the strategy in DOL's WIA and Job Corps evaluations (McConnell et al, 2016;Schochet, Burghardt, & McConnell, 2008). Such estimates from a proper sample of sites/states could then use this pooled estimate to represent sites/states for which there is no evidence, or for which there is not clear evidence that this site differs from the pooled estimate.…”

Social experiments of different kinds of counselling for newly unemployed

“…The experiment, conducted in 2015, consisted of more frequent meetings with a caseworker during the first quarter of unemployment and included randomization of 1 The evidence from experiments includes for instance Gorter and Kalb (1996), Dolton and O'Neill (1996), Dolton and O'Neill (2002), van den Berg and van der Klauuw (2006), Hägglund (2011), Graversen and van Ours (2008a), Graversen and van Ours (2008b), Crépon et al (2013), Arni (2015) and Maibom et al (2017). Two recent US studies include McConnell et al (2016) and Manoli et al (2018).…”