Since July 2004, the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants has been monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 present in the first year of the reform to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least eight months before job search is verified. Eight months after this notification and prior to the first monitoring interview, transitions to employment have increased by nearly nine percentage points compared to the counterfactual of no reform.

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become an increasingly important part of active labor market policies (ALMP) in many OECD countries. Germany is a good example where the spending on start-up subsidies for the unemployed accounted for nearly 17% of the total spending on ALMP in 2004. In contrast to other programs like vocational training, job creation schemes, or wage subsidies the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such schemes is still scarce; especially regarding long-term effects and effect heterogeneity. This paper aims to close this gap.

This paper explores whether wage, employment and tenure outcomes of workers taking up a job subsidized by the German Federal Employment Agency differ by industry. The analysis utilizes administrative data and statistical matching techniques; it covers an observation period of 3.5 years. First, we conduct a within-industry comparison of temporarily subsidized and otherwise similar unsubsidized workers. The findings show for most industries that subsidized workers had similar short-run wages, but fared significantly better in the longer run.

Evaluation studies have shown the high effectiveness of start-up subsidies for unemployed individuals to improve labour market outcomes of participants. What has not been examined yet are the potentially heterogeneous effects of start-up programmes across regional labour markets. Labour demand-side restrictions in deprived areas generally increase entries into start-up programmes as job offers are limited. However, the survival of firms in these areas is also lower, such that the overall effect remains unclear.

The German government has spent between 7bn and 11bn Euro per year on active labor market policies (ALMP) in East Germany in the last decade. The effectiveness of the most important programs (in terms of participants and spending) such as job-creation schemes and vocational training has been evaluated quite thoroughly in recent years. The results are disappointing, indicating that nearly all of these traditional programs have to be rated as a failure. In light of these findings, policies to encourage unemployed people to become self- employed gained increasing importance.

In this paper, we evaluate the Swedish self-employment program using data from administrative records about matched groups of program participants and nonparticipants. We find that participating in the program reduces the duration of unemployment and the risk for re-unemployment. The self-employment scheme is not found to result in a significant reduction of jobs elsewhere in the economy whereas the study estimates displacement effects in the order of 35 percent from the compound of other Swedish labor market programs.

Job search assistance and intensified counseling have been found to be effective for labor market integration by a large number of studies, but the evidence for older and hard-to-place unemployed individuals more specifically is mixed. In this paper we present key results from the evaluation of Perspektive 50plus, a large-scale active labor market program directed at the older unemployed in Germany. To identify the treatment effects, we exploit regional variation in program participation.

Offering unemployed individuals a subsidy to become self-employed is a widespread active labor market policy strategy. Previous studies have illustrated its high effectiveness to help participants escaping unemployment and improving their labor market prospects compared to other unemployed individuals. However, the examination of start-up subsidies from a business perspective has only received little attention to date.

This paper studies the causal effect of student internship experience on labor market choices and wages later in life. We use variation in the introduction and abolishment of mandatory internships at German universities as an instrument for completing an internship while attending university. Employing longitudinal data from graduate surveys, we find positive and significant wage returns of about six percent in both OLS and IV regressions.

This paper reports about a randomized experiment in which training vouchers of €1000 were given to low-skilled workers. The vouchers increase training participation by almost 20 percentage points in two years, relative to a base rate of 0.45. This increased participation comes at a substantial deadweight loss of almost 60%. Consistent with predictions from human capital theory, we find that vouchers cause a shift towards more general forms of training. We do not find any significant impact of the program on monthly wages or on job mobility.