Private and Public Provision of Counseling to Job-Seekers: Evidence from a Large Controlled Experiment
By Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon, Marc Gurgand. Social Science Research Network, 2014
143 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Contracting out public services to private firms has ambiguous effects when quality is imperfectly observable. Using a randomized experiment over a national sample in France, we compare the efficiency of the public employment service (PES) vs. private providers in delivering very similar job-search intensive counseling. The impact of each program is assessed with respect to the standard, low intensity track offered by the PES to the unemployed. We find that job-search assistance increases exit rates to employment by 15 to 35%. But the impact of the public program is about twice as large as compared to the private program, at least during the 6 first months after random assignment. We argue that the observed contract structure with the private providers has not overcome the underlying agency problem. We find no evidence of cream-skimming: rather, it seems that profit maximizing private providers have found it optimal to enroll as many job-seekers as they could, but to make minimum effort on the placement of some of them.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c4e3bfd45cdbd14f7de1bd1c4d2b53cb80dfb33
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- Bruno Crépon
- Esther Duflo
- Marc Gurgand
- Roland Rathelot
- David J. McKenzie
- S. Franklin
- Ioana Marinescu
- Abhijit Banerjee
In Gender Studies
- Esther Duflo
- Bruno Crépon
- Roland Rathelot
- Anna Lusardi
- Rohini Pande
- Michael Grossman
- Timothy J. Besley
- Siwan Anderson
Citations in the corpus
- Do Labor Market Policies have Displacement Effects? Evidence from a Clustered Randomized Experiment* (2013, background): “…job seekers.2 Experimental studies are still relatively rare, but they also tend to find positive impacts of counseling (Rosholm, 2008; Behaghel, Crépon, and Gurgand, 2012).3 However, an important criticism leveled against these studies is that they do not take into account potential…”