Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/67219 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 7013
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
In this paper we investigate how active labour market policy programmes affect firms' hiring strategies and, eventually, firms' performance. We focus on counseling and monitoring which may reduce search costs for employers, but which may have ambiguous effect on the employer-employee matching quality and thus on firms' performance. Using a large scale experiment which was conducted in Denmark in 2005-2006 and induced a greater provision of activation, we find that small firms hiring in the districts where the social experiment was conducted changed their hiring practices in favor of unemployed workers and experienced greater turnover than the other firms. Treated firms also experienced no change or a marginal reduction in value added and total factor productivity during the first years after the experiment. These results are consistent with the idea that monitoring creates compulsion effects which counteract the possible improvement in the matching process expected from job search assistance.
Subjects: 
active labour market programmes
counseling and monitoring
hiring decisions
firms performance
JEL: 
C21
J63
J68
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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