This paper examines whether contacts between caseworkers in public employment offices and employers impact on the reemployment chances of the unemployed they counsel. This analysis is made possible through a large administrative dataset on unemployed combined
with an extensive survey of caseworkers' characteristics and their strategies. This data was created for evaluating public employment services in Switzerland. We use econometric techniques from the treatment evaluation literature to identify causal effects of a more intense employer focus of the caseworkers. The estimation results indicate that caseworkers who maintain direct contacts to firms achieve higher reintegration rates.
Aktive Arbeitsmarktpolitik in der Schweiz wird der deutschen gegenübergestellt. Beide Länder haben viele Gemeinsamkeiten bezüglich Zielsetzung, Instrumenten und institutionellen Reformen von aktiver Arbeitsmarktpolitik. In der Schweiz stand jedoch bereits schon früher eine informative administrative Datenbasis zur Evaluation zur Verfügung, so dass arbeitsmarktliche Massnahmen dort
früher evaluiert werden konnten. Die gefundenen Wirkungen der schweizerischen Instrumente werden zusammengefasst. Positive Effekte können insbesondere für den Zwischenverdienst gefunden
werden, ein Instrument welches, vergleichbar zum Kombilohn, Anreize zur Aufnahme von Beschäftigung mit geringerer Bezahlung schafft. Ausserdem wird erörtert, wie durch eine effizientere
Allokation von Massnahmen eine höhere Beschäftigung hätte erreicht werden können. In einer Pilotstudie in der Schweiz ist ein statistisches Hilfsmittel zur Massnahmenauswahl erprobt worden. In
Deutschland wird ein ähnliches System gegenwärtig entwickelt. Für die Evaluation aktiver Arbeitsmarktpolitik und die Prognosen ihrer Wirkungen ist eine informative Datenbasis notwendig. Die schweizerischen und die deutschen Datensätze werden hierzu beschrieben.
(http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwvjh:75-3-8 )
The aim or this paper is to present a practical manual prepared for the World Health Organization (WHO) on how to identify, collect, estimate and compare costs of the available technical options to provide access to safe drinking water in low-income communities.
Should capital cost calculations be based on a global or local market benchmark? The December 2000 redefinition of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) global equity index was a natural experiment addressing this question. It is argued that this event triggered a portfolio shift (by index funds) large enough to affect the residual asset supplies constituting the global and local market benchmarks of all actively managed capital. Changes in the market benchmarks imply distinct and predictable changes to global and local stock betas. Exploring whether global or local beta changes best explain the cross-section of event returns reveals that stocks in developed markets are priced globally and not locally. (JEL G11, G14, G15)
La migration est la dimension négligée de la mondialisation, assure Tobias Müller. Le professeur d’économie à l’Université de Genève plaide pour des mesures actives d’insertion.
This paper provides a new theoretically-derived measure of preference margins at the product level, that takes into account competition across exporters as well as competition with domestic producers on a given market. This indicator is derived for differentiated goods under imperfect competition, in a frame-work extended from Ottaviano, Tabuchi and Thisse (2002). We compute our theoretically-based preference margin measure for the European Union market access over 5,000 products (HS-6 digits) exported by an exhaustive sample of 222 countries in 2008. This new measure reveals very low preference margins once adjusted for domestic and import competition. We also provide econometric correlations validating the relevance of both our “preferred” preference margin indicator and the theoretical framework used to derive it.
The aim of this paper is (i) to assess the impact of regional agreements on members’ trade in Sub-Saharan Africa (intra-regional trade as well as trade with the rest of the world), controlling for the other traditional determinants and (ii) to compare the respective effect of the preferential trade agreements and the currency unions. Considering the period 1962–96, we first assess the average impact of each regional agreement on their implementation period and second we show how these impacts have evolved. An ‘augmented’ gravity model is designed, relying on a transport cost function, in which specific dummies allow trade creation and trade diversion effects to be separated. The model is estimated in panel with bilateral specific effects, to isolate the non-observable characteristics of each pair of countries and according to the Hausman–Taylor (1981) method, which takes into account a possible endogeneity of some explanatory variables. During their implementation, the African regional trade agreements have generated a significant increase in trade between members, although initially often through trade diversion. In the two agreements of the CFA franc zone, the currency unions have largely reinforced the positive effect of the corresponding preferential trade agreements on intra-regional trade, while dampening their trade diversion effect.
