The Impact of Vocational Training for the Unemployed: Experimental Evidence from Turkey

By Sarojini Hirshleifer, David J. McKenzie, Rita Almeida, Cristóbal Ridao-cano. Social Science Research Network, 2014

187 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large-scale, active labor market policy: Turkey's vocational training programs for the unemployed. A detailed follow-up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity. The average impact of training on employment is positive, but close to zero and statistically insignificant, which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected. Over the first year after training, the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers. However, longer-term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/958ec9ad3df402f399af3ba0358d7f12ba6e008a

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

In General Health Professions

In Management of Technology and Innovation

David J. McKenzie

Citations in the corpus

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research (2018, unknown): “Other prominent early examples of economics studies that have employed pre-analysis plans include poverty targeting programs in Indonesia, an evaluation of the Toms shoe company donation program, and a job training program in Turkey, among many others (Olken, Onishi, and Wong 2012; Alatas et al. 201”
Active Labor Market Policies (2016, background): “Hirshleifer et al. (2014) found no impact for a professional training program in Turkey evaluated over three years on a large scale.”
How Effective are Active Labor Market Policies in Developing Countries? A Critical Review of Recent Evidence (2017, background): “Although this is a common policy option, the only evaluation of such a program in a developing country setting is Hirshleifer et al. (2016), who conduct a randomized experiment to evaluate Turkey’s program for the unemployed.”
The Changing Nature of Work (2018, background): “121 37 World Health Organization 2016. 38 Brambrilla, Irene, and Dario Tortarolo. 2018. “Investment in ICT, Productivity and Labor Demand: The Case of Argentina.” Policy Research Working Paper 8325, World Bank, Washington, DC. 39 Akerman, Gaarder and Mogstad 2015. 40 Autor and Dorn (2013) for the Un”