We have estimated effects of job practice for participants entering the programme between 1999 and 2006. On average the programme had a moderately sized positive effect for the participants - the expected time to work for the unemployed participants was reduced by around six per cent over a 700 days long follow-up horizon counted from the programme start date. Participation also gave rise to higher future labour income and a reduction in social assistance take-up.

In the extensive literature on the employment impact of public sponsored training programmes for the unemployed, insufficient attention has been paid to the differential impact of different types of training programmes and of their varying duration. This paper uses a unique dataset, which tracks the labour market position of a cohort of unemployment benefit claimants for almost two years, to evaluate the impact of a range of government sponsored training courses in Ireland.

Since 2005, jobless employable individuals have to be available for the labour market with various activation programmes helping them. One major programme is short-term training teaching certain skills or assisting in job search. However, little is known about the effectiveness of such a short programme for welfare recipients. This study evaluates the effects of seven short-term training types in the introduction period of the reform in spring 2005 on the individual probability of being regularly employed. I use large German administrative datasets and propensity score matching.

We estimate the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of different types of government-sponsored training in West Germany using particularly rich data that allows us to control for selectivity by matching methods and to measure interesting outcome variables over eight years after a program's start. We use distance-weighted radius matching together with a bias removal procedure based on weighted regressions in order to increase the precision and robustness of standard matching estimators.

The paper assesses the heterogeneity of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to estimate a continuous dose - response function that relates each value of the dose, i.e. days of training, to the individual post-treatment probability of employment (the response).

This paper aims to estimate the effect of an institutional training program on participants' chances of finding a job, using a rich dataset which comes from the official records of the Employment Service of Slovenia and taking into account the potential bias due to the existence of unobserved confounding factors. To deal with these selection biases, three methods are implemented in a comparative perspective: (1) instrumental variable (IV) regression; (2) Heckman's two-stage approach and (3) propensity score matching.

Our paper investigates the relative effects of wage subsidies and further vocational training on the subsequent employment prospects of previously unemployed program participants. First, we outline a theoretical approach based on a firm's hiring decision. For the relative effectiveness of both labor market programs the assumption concerning the formation of human capital is crucial and leads to competing hypotheses for the medium and long term. On the assumption that wage subsidies have no effect on human capital they improve individuals employment prospects less than training programs.

In the extensive literature on the employment impact of public-sponsored training programmes for the unemployed, insufficient attention has been paid to the differential impact of different types of programmes and training duration. This paper uses a unique dataset, which tracks the labour market position of a cohort of unemployment benefit claimants for almost two years, to evaluate the impact of a range of government-sponsored training courses in Ireland. Overall, we found that those who participated in training were less likely to be unemployed at the end of the two-year study period.

This study evaluates the employment effects of vocational labour market training in Finnish youth labour markets. We are especially interested in whether the timing of an intervention matters. We explore this issue by analyzing the monthly time paths of employment effects over an observation period of four years. The study adopts two different identifying assumptions in trying to identify the causal impact of training programmes, viz.

This paper estimates for a sample of means-tested unemployment benefit recipients the effects of their participation in short-term training programmes in Germany. We apply propensity score matching and rely on a large sample of treated and controls from administrative data, which in contrast to data used in many comparable evaluation studies is rich in terms of information on household members. We regard a period after the beginning of the year 2005 just after a reform of the means-tested benefit system, which aimed at activating employable people in needy households.