Osikominu, A.; (2008) Evaluating dynamically assigned training programs for the unemployed. Doctoral thesis , Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

Abstract

Reducing unemployment is an important political task in many industrialized economies. In particular, the continental European countries experienced ever increasing unemployment rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Since the mid-1990s, there is an increased interest in identifying best practices in administering active and passive labor market policies, both at the national and the supranational level. This requires a scientific review of labor market policies. In Germany, appropriate data for a rigorous evaluation of active labor market programs were not available for a long time. Only starting with the reforms in the late 1990s, policymakers have recognized the importance of a scientific assessment of labor market policies. As a result, access to large and informative data, emerging from different administrative processes, has now become possible. Based on unique administrative data for Germany this dissertation applies new dynamic evaluation methods to investigate the effectiveness of different types of training programs for the unemployed. The dissertation is composed of five self-contained papers. The first paper deals with data quality issues in the education variable in one of the data sources used. It thus documents an important part of the research to prepare the new databases for the evaluation analyses in this dissertation. The evaluation studies examine the impact of different types of training programs during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. From an econometric point of view, they are concerned with the causal analysis of dynamically assigned treatments. The second paper evaluates the longrun employment effects of different longer-term training schemes in the 1980s and 1990s. The third paper compares the effects of short-term training in the 1980s to those in the early 2000s. The fourth paper analyzes the employment effects of short- to long-term training schemes in the early 2000s and compares their differential effectiveness. These three evaluation studies apply sequential matching techniques building on the work of Sianesi (2004). The last paper, in contrast, uses duration methods in the spirit of Abbring and van den Berg (2003) to evaluate the dynamic effects of short-term and long-term training programs in the early 2000s on duration outcomes.

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