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Deregulating job placement in Europe: A microeconometric evaluation of an innovative voucher scheme in Germany

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  • Winterhager, Henrik
  • Heinze, Anja
  • Spermann, Alexander

Abstract

Job placement vouchers can be regarded as a tool to spur competition between public and private job placement activities. The German government launched this instrument in order to end the public placement monopoly and to subsidize its private competitors. We exploit very rich administrative data provided for the first time by the Federal Employment Agency and apply propensity score matching as a method to solve the fundamental evaluation problem and to estimate the effect of the vouchers. We find positive treatment effects on the employment probability after one year of 6.5 percentage points in Western Germany and give a measure for deadweight loss.
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  • Winterhager, Henrik & Heinze, Anja & Spermann, Alexander, 2006. "Deregulating job placement in Europe: A microeconometric evaluation of an innovative voucher scheme in Germany," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 505-517, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:labeco:v:13:y:2006:i:4:p:505-517
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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J68 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Public Policy
    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies

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