This article presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies. We categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. Job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts, whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective. Training programmes are associated with positive medium-term impacts, although in the short term they often appear ineffective. We also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters, but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate.The effectiveness of active labour market policies -including subsidised employment, training and job search assistance -has been a matter of vigorous debate over the past half century. 1 While many aspects of the debate remain unsettled, some progress has been made on the key question of how participation in an active labour market programme (ALMP) affects the labour market outcomes of the participants themselves. 2 Progress has been facilitated by rapid advances in methodology and data quality, and by a growing institutional commitment to evaluation in many countries, and has resulted in an explosion of professionally authored microeconometric evaluations. In their influential review Heckman et al. (1999) summarise approximately 75 microeconometric evaluation studies from the US and other countries. A more recent review by Kluve (forthcoming) includes nearly 100 separate studies from Europe alone, while Greenberg et al. (2003) survey 31 evaluations of government-funded programmes for the disadvantaged in the US.In this article we synthesise some of the main lessons in the recent microeconometric evaluation literature, using a new and comprehensive sample of programme estimates from the latest generation of studies. Our sample is derived from responses to a survey of 358 academic researchers affiliated Administration in 1935 were immediately controversial. 2 A key unsettled question is whether ALMPs affect the outcomes of those who do not participate, via displacement or other general equilibrium effects. See Johnson (1976) for an early but informative general equilibrium analysis of public sector employment programmes and Calmfors (1994) for a more recent critique, focusing on the European experience of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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