Active Labour Market Policies (active + labour_market_policy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Active labour market policy in East Germany

THE ECONOMICS OF TRANSITION, Issue 4 2009
Waiting for the economy to take off
Matching estimation; causal effects; programme evaluation; panel data Abstract We investigate the effects of the most important East German active labour market programmes on the labour market outcomes of their participants. The analysis is based on a large and informative individual database derived from administrative data sources. Using matching methods, we find that over a horizon of 2.5 years after the start of the programmes, they fail to increase the employment chances of their participants in the regular labour market. However, the programmes may have other effects for their participants that may be considered important in the especially difficult situation experienced in the East German labour market. [source]


Low-wage work in five European countries and the United States

INTERNATIONAL LABOUR REVIEW, Issue 4 2009
Gerhard BOSCH
Abstract. Analysing research findings on Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, the author shows that the incidence and conditions of low-paid employment in each country are determined by a set of institutions, including minimum wage and active labour market policies, tax and social security systems, and collective bargaining. The widely assumed trade-off between employment and wages, he argues, is not inescapable: active labour market policies for individual empowerment and institutions imposing "beneficial constraints" can prevent improved conditions at the bottom of the earnings distribution from translating into higher unemployment, while also helping to narrow inequalities. [source]


New social risks in postindustrial society: Some evidence on responses to active labour market policies from Eurobarometer

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY REVIEW, Issue 3 2004
Peter Taylor-Gooby
One result of the complex economic and social changes currently impacting on state welfare is the emergence of what may be termed "new social risks" as part of the shift to a postindustrial society. These concern access to adequately paid employment, particularly for lower-skilled young people, in an increasingly flexible labour market, and managing work-life balance for women with family responsibilities engaged in full-time careers. They coexist with the old social risks that traditional welfare states developed to meet, which typically concern retirement from or interruption to paid work, in most cases for a male "breadwinner". New social risks offer policymakers the opportunity to transform vice into virtue by replacing costly passive benefits with policies which mobilize the workforce, arguably enhancing economic competitiveness, and reduce poverty among vulnerable groups. However, the political constituencies to support such policies are weak, since the risks affect people most strongly at particular life stages and among specific groups. This paper examines attitudes to new social risk labour market policies in four contrasting European countries. It shows that attitudes in this area are strongly embedded in overall beliefs about the appropriate scale, direction and role of state welfare interventions, so that the weakness of new social risk constituencies does not necessarily undermine the possibility of attracting support for such policies, provided they are developed in ways that do not contradict national traditions of welfare state values. [source]


Programme Evaluation with Multiple Treatments

JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 2 2004
Markus Frölich
Abstract., This paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation. Particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes, which is of high relevance in practice. For example, active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes, employment programmes and wage subsidies. Similarly, sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non-vocational rehabilitation measures. First, the main identification strategies (control-for-confounding-variables, difference-in-difference, instrumental-variable, and regression-discontinuity identification) are discussed in the multiple-programme setting. Thereafter, the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined. [source]


Labour Market Policies and Long-term Unemployment in a Flow Model of the Australian Labour Market

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 2 2003
Ric D. Herbert
This paper develops a general equilibrium job matching model, which is used to assess the impact of active labour market policies, reductions in unemployment benefits and reductions in worker bargaining power on long-term unemployment and other key macro variables. The model is calibrated using Australian data. Simulation experiments are conducted through impulse response analysis. The simulations suggest that active labour market programs (ALMPs) targeted at the long-term unemployed have a small net impact and produce adverse spillover effects on short-term unemployment. Reducing the level of unemployment benefits relative to wages and worker bargaining power have more substantial effects on total and long-term unemployment and none of the spillover effects of ALMPs. [source]