Job Banks as Mediators and Employers – A Revised Assessment of the Employment Effect of Job Banks

In this report, we re-assess the role of so-called job banks as mediators into the open labour market but also as employers of unemployed job-seekers. The focus is primarily on the unemployed who became job bank clients during 2013. We follow up the labour market situation of these individuals during one year’s timeahead, until the end of 2014. In the latter part of the report, we compare the main findings to those obtained for the unemployed having re-entered the labour market with the help of a job bank either in 2011 or 2012. We present two different sets of results concerning individuals’ near-future labour market experiences. The first set illustrates the development of their employment situation more generally both before and after employment via a job bank while the second set reports results obtained from using statistical evaluation methods. The results indicate that the labour market prospects of those having been employed via a job bank have, on average, been clearly better than for identical unemployed persons who did not use the services of a job bank. Moreover, those employed via a job bank often also seem to have faced better opportunities to stay employed. The results are the same irrespective of whether or not the job bank client‘s employment involves wage subsidies.