A Microeconometric Evaluation of the Active Labour Market Policy in Switzerland

By M. Lechner, M. Gerfin. Economic Journal, 2002

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the late 1990s, Switzerland introduced an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing several programmes. We evaluate their effects on the individual employment probability using unusually informative data from administrative records. Using a matching estimator for multiple programmes, we find positive effects for one particular programme unique to the Swiss ALMP. It consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed. We also find negative effects for traditional employment programmes operated in sheltered labour markets. For training courses, the results are mixed.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45df2225f8dddd975090f4df9fc42357cf9ad407

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Citations in the corpus

Affinely invariant matching methods with discriminant mixtures of proportional ellipsoidally symmetric distributions (2006, methodology): “This paper examines the consequences of matching using affinely invariant methods when the covariate distributions are “discriminant mixtures of proportional ellipsoidally symmetric” (DMPES) distributions, a class herein defined, which generalizes the ellipsoidal symmetry class of Rubin and Thomas…”
Costs and benefits of Danish active labour market programmes (2008, background): “See Heckman et al. (1998) and Black and Smith (2004) for technical details.”
Retaining through training even for older workers (2013, background): “Training programmes are found to have a modest or no effect on unemployment exit rates (Gerﬁn and Lechner, 2002; Andrén and Andrén, 2006; Crépon et al., 2007; Lechner et al., 2008; Lalive et al., 2008; Sianesi, 2008) and on wages (Heckman et al., 1999).”
Some practical issues in the evaluation of heterogeneous labour market programmes by matching methods (2002, methodology): “Indeed, Gerfin and Lechner (2000) argue that their data is so rich, that it seems plausible to assume that all important factors that jointly influence labour market outcomes and the process selecting people into the different states can be observed.”
Beyond The Average Effects: The Distributional Impacts of Export Promotion Programs in Developing Countries (2010, background): “To double-check whether this might be affecting our estimates, we confine our attention to the first program participation (see, e.g., Lechner, 2002; and Gerfin and Lechner, 2002).”
The relative efficiency of labour market pro-grammes: Swedish experience from the 1990s (2004, methodology): “…the caseworkers use similar selection criteria 2 Bonnal et. al (1997) use French data from the mid-80’s on young unemployed workers, and Ridder (1986) use Dutch data (Rotterdam) from the late 70’s. Gerfin and Lechner (2000) use a very large and recent Swiss data set on unemployed adult workers.”
An evaluation of the active labour market programmes in Sweden (2001, background): “5 Some Western European countries’ labour market programmes share a few of the Swedish features (in particular, a variety of ongoing measures); see in particular the recent work by Lechner (e.g. 1996, 1999a, 1999b) and Gerfin and Lechner (2000).”
Sequential Matching Estimation of Dynamic Causal Models (2004, unknown): “They cover a reasonable range given recent labour market applications of matching methods (e.g. Gerfin and Lechner, 2002, or Sianesi, 2001).”
Counseling the Unemployed: Does it Lower Unemployment Duration and Recurrence? (2005, unknown): “In a comparable situation, Gerfin and Lechner (2002) or Sianesi (2004) have evaluated several training and subsidized jobs programs simultaneously, using matching methods with rich data bases, assuming selection on observables.”
The microeconometric estimation of treatment effects—An overview (2006, result): “That is, we observe the outcome with 1See e.g. Caliendo, Hujer, and Thomsen (2005) for Germany, Sianesi (2004) for Sweden, Gerfin and Lechner (2002) for Switzerland or van den Berg, van der Klaauw, and van Ours (2004) for the Netherlands.”
Food standards, certification, and poverty among coffee farmers in Uganda (2015, methodology): “We follow theoretical foundations by Imbens (2000) and Lechner (2001) and empirical applications by Gerfin & Lechner (2002) and Lechner (2002) for estimating propensity scores with multiple treatments.”