Transitions to Long-Term Unemployment Risk Among Young People: Evidence from Ireland

Many young people have short spells of unemployment during their transition from school to work; however, some often get trapped in unemployment and risk becoming long-term unemployed (OECD, 2009). Much research has been undertaken on the factors that influence unemployment risk for young people during their school-to-work transition. However, very little is known about the factors associated with long-term unemployment risk for those youths that become unemployed. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by identifying the characteristics associated with young peoples? long-term unemployment risk in Ireland. The research, which is conducted using multivariate statistical analysis, uses a combination of unemployment register data and information gathered from a specially designed claimant questionnaire that was issued to all jobseekers making an unemployment benefit claim between September and December 2006. The results indicate that factors such as a recent history of long-term unemployment, a lack of basic literacy/numeracy skills and low levels of educational attainment, all have a significant impact on the likelihood that young people will remain unemployed for 12 months or more. A number of attributes are gender specific, such as the presence of children, additional welfare benefits and spousal earnings for females, and apprenticeship training and participation in a public sector job creation scheme for males. Comparisons with the characteristics associated with older welfare claimants long-term unemployment risk, reveal some interesting difference between younger and older unemployed individuals

One Dummy Won t Get it: The Impact of Training Programme Type and Duration on the Employment Chances of the Unemployed in Ireland

In the extensive literature on the employment impact of public?sponsored training programmes for the unemployed, insufficient attention has been paid to the differential impact of different types of programmes and training duration. This paper uses a unique dataset, which tracks the labour market position of a cohort of unemployment benefit claimants for almost two years, to evaluate the impact of a range of government?sponsored training courses in Ireland. Overall, we found that those who participated in training were less likely to be unemployed at the end of the two?year study period. However, the average effect of training varied by the type and duration of training received. In general, we found strong positive effects for job?search skills training and medium?to high?level skills courses, a more modest positive effect for general vocational skills programmes (which are not strongly linked to demand in the labour market) and less consistent effects with respect to low?level skills training. We also found that training episodes with lower duration had a more positive impact, with the exception of high?level skills training programmes where longer training durations appear more effective. The results suggest that, in the Irish context, there are potentially substantial benefits to re?orientating unemployment training provision away from standard classroom vocational training towards the medium to highlevel skill end of the market and demonstrate that, in most cases, training durations can be reduced without lowering the effectiveness of the interventions

Track Reconstruction with Cosmic Ray Data at the Tracker Integration Facility

The subsystems of the CMS silicon strip tracker were integrated and commissioned at the Tracker Integration Facility (TIF) in the period from November 2006 to July 2007. As part of the commissioning, large samples of cosmic ray data were recorded under various running conditions in the absence of a magnetic field. Cosmic rays detected by scintillation counters were used to trigger the readout of up to 15\,\% of the final silicon strip detector, and over 4.7~million events were recorded. This document describes the cosmic track reconstruction and presents results on the performance of track and hit reconstruction as from dedicated analyses