Empirical measurement of impacts of active labour market programmes has started to become a central task of economic researchers. New improved econometric methods have been developed that will probably influence future empirical work in various other fields of economics as well. This volume contains a selection of original papers from leading experts, among them James J. Heckman, Noble Prize Winner 2000 in economics, addressing these econometric issues at the theoretical and empirical level. The theoretical part contains papers on tight bounds of average treatment effects, instrumental variables estimators, impact measurement with multiple programme options and statistical profiling. The empirical part provides the reader with econometric evaluations of active labour market programmes in Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Slovak Republic and Sweden.

Provides an overview of the microeconometric evaluation methods for evaluation of labour market and other public policies. This book focuses on the propensity score matching method and gives guidance for its implementation. It uses this method to evaluate the employment effects of job creation schemes on the participating individuals in Germany.

This book argues that active labour market policies are necessary to improve the position of the unemployed but have so far performed relatively poorly. The contributing authors seek ways to improve active labour market policy and consider three means of doing so: improving the quality by better targeting and by better-designed measures, more efficient implementation and delivery, and better performance by benchmarking the various implementation agencies involved.

Most governments in today's market economies spend significant sums of money on labour market programmes. The declared aims of these programmes are to increase the re-employment chances of the unemployed. This book investigates which active labour market programmes in Poland are value for money and which are not. To this end, modern statistical methods are applied to both macro- and microeconomic data. It is shown that training programmes increase, whereas job subsidies and public works decrease the re-employment opportunities of the unemployed. In general, all active labour market policy effects are larger in absolute size for men than for women. By surveying previous studies in the field and outlining the major statistical approaches that are employed in the evaluation literature, the book can be of help to any student interested in programme evaluation irrespective of the paticular programme or country concerned.

This timely two-volume set brings together seminal works on active labour market policies. Topics covered in this collection include econometric policy evaluation, social experiments, regression discontinuity designs, evaluations of active labour market policies and ending with final conclusions on evaluating the evaluations. Along with an original introduction by Professor LaLonde, this in-depth collection will be an invaluable source of reference for academics, scholars and practitioners.

Modern labor economics has continued to grow and develop since the first volumes of this Handbook were published. The subject matter of labor economics continues to have at its core an attempt to systematically find empirical analyses that are consistent with a systematic and parsimonious theoretical understanding of the diverse phenomenon that make up the labor market. As before, many of these analyses are provocative and controversial because they are so directly relevant to both public policy and private decision making. In many ways the modern development in the field of labor economics continues to set the standards for the best work in applied economics.This volume of the Handbook has a notable representation of authors - and topics of importance - from throughout the world.

Conference papers, theoretical analysis of labour economics and econometric models of labour market dynamics - covers areas such as job searching process, unemployment duration, occupational choice upon entry into working life, disparity in transition rates from unemployed to employed status between whites and blacks, wage structure, labour policy, occupational change, etc. Graphs, references, statistical tables.

After unification large amounts of money were spent to retrain the East Germany labour force in order to ease the transition to the new market economy. This book uses microeconometric methods and individual data to evaluate the impact of these training programmes on the participants' labour market situation. It discusses the appropriate evaluation methodology as well as the effectiveness of the actual programmes for the individual participants. The empirical results suggest that the public sector sponsored training programmes were fairly ineffective. In contrast, the training organized and paid by the enterprises caused considerable earnings growings.

One of the major issues of policy makers in The Netherlands is to reduce the high unemployment rate. In 1988 economic growth was substantial in all OECD countries, which led to an increase in employment. The economic growth also induced extra labour supply, especially of married women, which altogether led to a smaller reduction in the unemployment rate than could have been expected in view of the economic growth (see Rapportage Arbeidsmarkt, 1989). The estimated official unemployment rate in 1988 is still 11. 0% of the total labour force. Therefore, there is a strong interest in policies that seek to increase employment (the demand side of the labour market) as well as in understanding the factors that influence labour supply. In this thesis we try to further such understanding by constructing a detailed model of household labour supply. The data we use relate t9 Dutch households in 1985. In that year the official rate of unemployment was 15. 9%. A distinguishing feature of Dutch labour supply is its very low level of female labour force participation, e. g. in 1985 it was only 35. 2%. Apart from Spain, which had a similar participation rate, most other industrialized OECD countries had a participation rate of around 60% (see OECD Labor Force Statistics).