Unemployed and their Caseworkers: Should they be Friends or Foes?

In many countries, caseworkers in a public employment office have the dual roles of counselling and monitoring unemployed persons. These roles often conflict with each other leading to important caseworker heterogeneity: Some consider providing services to their clients and satisfying their demands as their primary task. Others may however pursue their strategies even against the will of the unemployed person. They may assign job assignments and labour market programmes without consent of the unemployed person. Based on a very detailed linked jobseeker-caseworker dataset, we investigate the effects of caseworkers' cooperativeness on the employment probabilities of their clients. Modified statistical matching methods reveal that caseworkers who place less emphasis on a cooperative and harmonic relationship with their clients increase their employment chances in the short and medium term.Public employment services, unemployment, statistical matching methods

A Danish Profiling System

We describe the statistical model used for profiling new unemployed workers in Denmark. When a worker - during his or her first six months in unemployment - enters the employment office for the first time, this model predicts whether he or she will be unemployed for more than six months from that date or not. The case workers’ assessment of how to treat the person is partially based upon this prediction.unemployment duration; profiling

Better an insecure job than no job at all? Unemployment, job insecurity and subjective wellbeing

We analyze the impact of a person’s current employment status and expectations about his or her future labor market status on life satisfaction, using long -run panel data for Germany. Our findings suggest that future expectations (measured by perceived job security for the employed and chances to find a new job for the unemployed) are at least as important for a person ’s subjective well-being as his or her current employment status. This implies that an unemployed person who thinks it will be easy to find a new job might be happier than if he had an insecure job. There might be circum¬stances under which having no job is less harmful for subjective well-being than being employed in an insecure one.Financial Development

Duration dependence in unemployment insurance and social assistance; consequences of profiling for the unemployed

It is well-known that the probability of an unemployed person finding a job decreases over the unemployment spell. On the one hand, this results from duration dependence at the individual level: unemployed job seekers may become discouraged, loose their working skills and become stigmatised by potential employers (‘pure' individual effects). On the other hand, if there is variation between individual exit rates, there is dynamic sorting of the unemployed with low exit probabilities (‘sorting effects'). Based on Dutch micro-data of social assistance (SA) and unemployment insurance beneficiaries (UI) for 1989-1996, we investigate to what extent this so-called ‘negative duration dependence' is due to sorting effects, as well as ‘pure' individual effects. The analysis suggests that after an unemployment spell of half a year, the decrease in the job finding rate for SA recipients can be attributed for 20% to 25% to sorting effects. After a three- to four-year period, the probability to find a job deteriorates further, but only due to individual duration effects. For UI recipients, similar results are found. From this, we conclude that profiling measures that target the inflow of unemployed with bad job prospects bear an important risk: unemployed that are initially classified as having good job prospects may also become long-term unemployed. Therefore, labor market policies should also focus on general measures, for example, by encouraging search activities of all workers that have spent a certain length of time in unemployment.

Partnership, Gender Roles and the Well-Being Cost of Unemployment

We use the differences between life satisfaction and emotional well-being of employed and unemployed persons to analyze how a person\u27s employment status affects cognitive well-being. Our results show that unemployment has a negative impact on cognitive, but not on affective well-being, which we interpret as a loss in identity utility. Living in a partnership strengthens the loss in identity utility of men, but weakens that of women. Unemployment of a person\u27s partner reduces the identity loss of unemployed men, but raises it for women. These results suggest that the unemployed\u27s feeling of identity is affected by traditional gender roles, while this does not seem to be the case for the affective part of their subjective well-being

On the treadmill: young and long-term unemployed in Australia

The number of young Australians who are unemployed for longer than a year has more than tripled since 2008, according to this report. Introduction Youth unemployment has been marching upward in Australia in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. The unemployment rate nationally among those aged 15 to 24 at March 2014 stands at 12.5 per cent – more than double the overall rate of unemployment. The experience of being young and unemployed is also changing. The inexorable rise in the incidence of youth unemployment has come alongside an increase in the length of unemployment for those aged 15 to 24. In January 2008, the average duration of unemployment for a young person in Australia was slightly above 16 weeks. More than five years later – by February 2014 – the average duration had risen to nearly 29 weeks

A Duration-Sensitive Measure of the Unemployment Rate: Theory and Application.

The measurement of unemployment, like that of poverty, involves two distict steps: identification and aggregation. In this two-step process, the issue of identifying the unemployed has received considerable attention but, once the unemployed have been identiified, the aggregation issue has been addressed by simply "counting heads": the unemployment rate is conventionally defined as the proportion of the labour force that, on a given date, is unemployed. This, in particular, leads to differences between individuals, in their unemployment experiences being ignored when the unemployment rate is being computed. This paper - predicated on the proposition that what matters to a person is not just the fact of unemployment but also its duration - proposes a methodology, derived from the measurement of income inequality, for adjusting unemployment rates so as to make them "duration-sensitive". In consequence, different values of the "duration-sensitive" rate will, depending upon the degree of inequality in the distribution of unemployment duration, and upon the extent to which society is averse to such inequality, be associated with the same value of the conventionally defined unemployment rate. A numerical example, based on published data for seven major OECD countries, illustrates the methodology.

Do 'Bad' Jobs Lead to 'Good' Jobs?: Evidence for 1997-2007

For some years now the German Government has been imposing increasingly strict job search requirements on unemployed people. One aim of current policy is to ensure that, if citizens accept unemployment benefits, they must actively search for work. Clearly, case managers try to match jobs to the qualifications of their clients, but it is generally required that individuals must take any job they are capable of doing, or risk losing benefits. One implied and sometimes stated justification for the requirement is that, once a person enters or re-enters the job market, he/she may have an improved chance of finding a better paying or more satisfying job, compared with someone who remains unemployed. Simply put, the idea is that any job is better than none, that 'bad' jobs may lead to 'good' jobs, or at least to 'better' jobs.

Targeting Labour Market Programmes - Results from a Randomized Experiment

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assist caseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour market programmes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labour market outcome for each programme and thereby suggested an 'optimal' labour market programme for each unemployed person. The support system was piloted in several employment offices. In those pilot offices, half of the caseworkers used the system and the other half acted as control group. The allocation of the caseworkers to treatment and control group was random. The experiment was designed such that caseworkers retained full discretion about the choice of active labour market programmes, and the evaluation results showed that caseworkers largely ignored the statistical support system. This indicates that stronger incentives are needed for caseworkers to comply with statistical profiling and targeting systems.Profiling, active labour market programmes, ALMP, statistical treatment rules, unemployment, public employment services

Locus of Control and Job Search Strategies

Standard job search theory assumes that unemployed individuals have perfect information about the effect of their search effort on the job offer arrival rate. In this paper, we present an alternative model which assumes instead that each individual has a subjective belief about the impact of his or her search effort on the rate at which job offers arrive. These beliefs depend in part on an individual's locus of control, i.e., the extent to which a person believes that future outcomes are determined by his or her own actions as opposed to external factors. We estimate the impact of locus of control on job search behavior using a novel panel data set of newly-unemployed individuals in Germany. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find evidence that individuals with an internal locus of control search more and that individuals who believe that their future outcomes are determined by external factors have lower reservation wages.job search behavior, search effort, reservation wage, locus of control, unemployment duration