Coaching, Counseling, Case-Working: Do They Help the Older Unemployed Out of Benefit Receipt and Back Into the Labor Market?

Abstract

Intensified counseling, job search assistance and related policies have been found to be effective for labor market integration of the unemployed by a large number of studies, but the evidence for older and hard‐to‐place unemployed is more mixed. In this paper, we present key results for a large‐scale active labor market program directed at the older unemployed in Germany. To identify the treatment effects, we exploit regional variation in program participation. We use a combination of different evaluation estimators to check the sensitivity of the results to selection, substitution and local labor market effects. We find positive effects of the program in the range of 5–10 percentage points on integration into unsubsidized employment. However, there are also substantial lock‐in effects, such that program participants have a higher probability of remaining on public welfare benefit receipt for up to 1 year after commencing the program.

Are active labour market policies effective for the older unemployed? A meta-evaluation

“…Apart from the evaluations included in the database, we also consider other evaluations that, despite being excluded from the main analysis due to a lack of data, provide interesting information to interpret the above results. For training policies, impact evaluations that use both the difference in differences and matching methods (Romeu-Gordo and Wolff, 2011;Boockmann and Brandle, 2018) show similar effects to those obtained in our analysis, i.e. positive effects.…”

“…Fourth, we discarded two studies due to a lack of information necessary for our meta-evaluation. Boockmann and Brandle (2018), despite fulfilling all desired characteristics, does not provide information on standard errors. Romeu-Gordo and Wolff (2011) was excluded for the same reason.…”

“…Fourth, we discarded two studies due to a lack of information necessary for our meta-evaluation. Boockmann and Brandle (2018), despite fulfilling all desired characteristics, does not provide information on standard errors. Romeu-Gordo and Wolff ( 2011 Following the review, the database for this investigation consisted of 82 evaluated impacts extracted from six studies that fulfilled the requirements for inclusion.…”

Activating Older Unemployed Individuals: A Case Study of Online Job Search Peer Groups

“…The setting and design of the digital intervention, aimed explicitly at individuals above the age of 50, might serve as a potential reason for the strong participation. Research demonstrates that older job seekers mostly benefit from interventions specifically targeted to them [9,36]. Furthermore, the intervention design was informed by prior literature.…”

“…The authors argued that job seekers above the age of 50 might have a reduced ability to effectively navigate online resources [35]. Another explanation, demonstrated in research on offline job search interventions, might be the fact that older job seekers mostly benefit from targeted interventions [9,36].…”