What is the Value Added by Caseworkers?

By M. Lechner, Jeffrey A. Smith. Social Science Research Network, 2007

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the allocation of unemployed individuals to different subprograms within Swiss active labour market policy by the caseworkers at local employment offices in Switzerland in 1998. We are particularly interested in whether the caseworkers allocate the unemployed to services in ways that will maximize the program-induced changes in their employment probabilities. Our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data originating from administrative unemployment and social security records. For the estimation we apply matching estimators adapted to the case of multiple programmes. The number of observations in this database is sufficiently high to allow for this nonparametric analysis to be conducted in narrowly defined subgroups. Our results indicate that Swiss caseworkers do not do a very good job of allocating their unemployed clients to the subprograms so as to maximize their subsequent employment prospects. Our findings suggest one of three possible conclusions. First, case-workers may be trying to solve the problem of allocating the unemployed to maximize their subsequent employment, but may lack the skills or knowledge to do this. Second, caseworkers may have a goal other than efficiency, such as allocating the most expensive services to the least well-off clients, that is not explicit in the law regulating active labour market policies. Third, the distortions of the local decision process could be due to federal authorities imposing strict minimum participation requirements for the various programs at the regional level.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a501c4c4ac956d7f59c0e2beb4f5875fadaa7b08

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 Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

What Did All the Money Do? On the General Ineffectiveness of Recent West German Labour Market Programmes (2008, unknown): “jobseekers to programmes also becomes crucial for the overall effectiveness of the programmes (see e.g. Frölich, Lechner, and Steiger, 2003; Lechner and Smith, 2007; Lechner and Wunsch, 2006a; Frölich, 2007).”
Inferring Welfare Maximizing Treatment Assignment Under Budget Constraints (2012, unknown): “On the empirical side, treatment targeting has been investigated in job-training contexts, c.f., Berger, Black and Smith (2001), Frolich (2008), Behnke et al (2008), Lechner and Smith (2007).”
The effects of vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany (2004, background): “From their OECD countries experiences review, Martin and Grubb (2001) note four crucial features for effective training programmes: First, there should be a tight targeting on participants, i.”
Active Labor Market Policies (2016, background): “15 Although they were unable to precisely evaluate the gains associated with optimal targeting, Frölich et al. (2003) and Lechner & Smith (2007) show that the assignments made by caseworkers are suboptimal on average.”