Active Labor Market Policy Evaluations: A Meta-Analysis

By David Card, Jochen Kluve, Andrea Weber. Social Science Research Network, 2010

536 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample consists of 199 program estimates drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. In about one-half of these cases we have both a short-term impact estimate (for a one-year post-program horizon) and a medium-term estimate (two-year horizon). We characterize the program estimates according to the type and duration of the program, the characteristics of the participants, and the evaluation methodology. Heterogeneity in all three dimensions affects the likelihood that an impact estimate is significantly positive, significantly negative, or statistically insignificant. Comparing program types, subsidized public sector employment programs have the least favorable impact estimates. Job search assistance programs have relatively favorable short-run impacts, whereas classroom and on-the-job training programs tend to show better outcomes in the medium-run than the short-run. Programs for youths are less likely to yield positive impacts than untargeted programs, but there are no large or systematic differences by gender. Methodologically, we find that the outcome variable used to measure program effectiveness matters. Evaluations based on registered unemployment durations are more likely to show favorable short-term impacts. Controlling for the outcome measure, and the type of program and participants, we find that experimental and non-experimental studies have similar fractions of significant negative and significant positive impact estimates, suggesting that the research designs used in recent non-experimental evaluations are unbiased.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b60731438be35c6bcdf543237f07881d6e33ce5

Citations in the corpus

• The Effects of Unemployment Insurance Benefits: New Evidence and Interpretation (2016, unknown): “…effect on unemployment duration on the job finding rates, as can arise if workers experience skill depreciation.24 There is a large literature analyzing the effect of a range of active labor market programs (ALMP) on employment outcomes of the unemployed in general (e.g. Card et al., 2010, 2015c).”
• Practical procedures to deal with common support problems in matching estimation (2017, unknown): “One example that received much attention in the recent applied literature is the evaluation of active labour market programmes (ALMP) based on very informative and large administrative data (see the meta study by Card, Kluve, and Weber, 2010, for a comprehensive summary of this literature).”
• Estimating vertical spillovers from FDI: Why results vary and what the true effect is (2011, unknown): “Meta-analysis, the quantitative method of research synthesis, has been commonly used in economics for two decades (Card & Krueger, 1995; Smith & Huang, 1995; Card et al., 2010).”
• Learning about job search: A field experiment with job seekers in Germany (2015, unknown): “Thus, consistent with the findings presented in Card et al. (2015), the effects of the brochure cumulate and only become visible with a delay (see panels in the right column of Figure 1).”
• Young People and the Great Recession (2011, unknown): “1) Is youth unemployment cyclical or structural? Clark and Summers (1982), in their classic study of the dynamics of youth joblessness argue that the problem of teenage unemployment arises from a shortage of jobs.”
• Use renewables to be cleaner: Meta-analysis of the renewable energy consumption–economic growth nexus (2014, unknown): “It is being picked up in many areas in economics, more particularly in labour economics [16, 17, 18], in macroeconomics of growth and fiscal policy [19], in transport economics [20-23], in marketing [24, 25] and in convergence literature [26].”
• The Scandinavian model—An interpretation (2014, unknown): “Card et al. (2010) provide an extensive meta-analysis, concluding that “job search assistance programs yield relatively favorable program impacts, whereas public sector employment programs are less effective.”
• Do Labor Market Policies have Displacement Effects? Evidence from a Clustered Randomized Experiment* (2013, unknown): “…labor market policies, whose effects have in general be found to be weak, most studies tend to find a significant and positive impact of this form of counseling, especially for job seekers with a low risk of long-duration unemployment (see reviews in Kluve, 2006; Card, Kluve, and Weber, 2010).”
• Active Labor Market Policies (2016, unknown): “The meta-analyses by Card et al. (2010, 2015), reviewing evaluations carried out since 1997, reveal a general tendency in favor of job seekers' return to employment.”
• The Own-Wage Elasticity of Labor Demand: A Meta-Regression Analysis (2014, unknown): “Following Card et al. (2010), Table A.1 in the Appendix provides detailed information on the distribution of estimates by country and latest publication date.”
• What fiscal policy is most effective? A Meta Regression Analysis (2015, unknown): “In line with other authors (De Grauwe and Costa Storti, 2004); Nijkamp and Poot, 2004; Card et al., 2010; Rusnák et al., 2011), I therefore prefer to include more than one observation per study.1 This method has been shown to be superior to picking single observations per paper (Bijmolt and…”