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Governments around the developing world face pressure to intervene actively to help jobseekers find employment. Two of the most common policies used are job training, based on the idea that many of those seeking jobs lack the skills employers want, and job search assistance, based on the possibility that even if workers have the skills demanded, search and matching frictions make it difficult for workers to be hired in the jobs that need these skills. However, reviews of the first generation of evaluations of these programs found typical impacts to be small, casting doubt on the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of these programs. This paper re-examines the arguments for whether, when, and how, developing country governments should undertake job training and job search assistance policies. We use our experience with policy implementation, and evidence from recent impact evaluations, to argue that there is still a role for governments in using these programs. However, success depends critically on program design and delivery elements that can be difficult to scale effectively, and in many cases the binding constraint may be a lack of firms with job openings, rather than a lack of workers with the skills to fill these openings.

We develop and evaluate experimentally a novel tool that redesigns the job search process by providing tailored advice at lowcost. We invited jobseekers to our computer facilities for twelve consecutive weekly sessions to search for real jobs on our web interface. For one-half, instead of relying on their own search criteria, we use readily available labour market data to display relevant alternative occupations and associated jobs. The data indicate that this broadens the set of jobs they consider and increases their job interviews especially for participants who otherwise search narrowly and have been unemployed for a few months.

This article reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect (displacement) impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young, educated job seekers in France. We use a two-step design. In the first step, the proportions of job seekers to be assigned to treatment (0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%) were randomly drawn for each of the 235 labor markets (e.g., cities) participating in the experiment. Then, in each labor market, eligible job seekers were randomly assigned to the treatment, following this proportion. After eight months, eligible, unemployed youths who were assigned to the program were significantly more likely to have found a stable job than those who were not. But these gains are transitory, and they appear to have come partly at the expense of eligible workers who did not benefit from the program, particularly in labor markets where they compete mainly with other educated workers, and in weak labor markets. Overall, the program seems to have had very little net benefits.

How do states manage their populations? Some scholars see the state as primarily governing through punishment, but how might the state engage in other forms of disciplining subjects? I address these questions by exploring the state management of labor migration through interviews and participant observation of compulsory government workshops. I look at the case of Filipino domestic workers in Arab states. States are said to exercise bio-power when they market and discipline migrants to be competitive and compliant workers, in the process ignoring migrant vulnerabilities. In contrast, this article establishes that sending states attend to migrant vulnerabilities. In addition to bio-power, states also exercise pastoral power, caring for the well-being of migrants through the creation of labor standards, regulation of migration, and education policies. This analysis extends our understanding of the state management of migration as well as the state management of populations as it advances Foucault’s discussion of the exercise of power.

This article presents a meta‐analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies. We categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. Job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts, whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective. Training programmes are associated with positive medium‐term impacts, although in the short term they often appear ineffective. We also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters, but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate.

This thematic issue of Work, Employment and Society is comprised of a variety of fascinating articles that we have grouped together under a broad umbrella theme of 'Good Jobs and Bad Jobs'. Within this broad theme, this issue's contributions contemplate the questions of job quality, its deterioration and improvement, and complexities of doing 'dirty work' in a variety of national contexts including Europe, North America and South-East Asia. This foreword aims to offer some contextual background to the topic and to tease out the main themes and contributions that the articles in the issue make to current scholarship.

Identifying policy-relevant treatment effects from randomized experiments requires the absence of spillovers between participants and nonparticipants (SUTVA) or variation in observed treatment levels. We find that SUTVA is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers. Using a difference-in-differences model, we show that nonparticipants in the experiment regions find jobs more slowly after the introduction of the program than workers in other regions. We estimate an equilibrium search model to identify the policy-relevant treatment effect. A large-scale rollout of the program is shown to decrease welfare, while a standard partial micro-econometric cost-benefit analysis concludes the opposite.

Online professional networking platforms are widely used and may help workers to search for and obtain jobs. We run the first randomized evaluation of training work seekers to join and use one of the largest platforms, LinkedIn. Training increases the end- of-program employment rate by 10 percent (7 percentage points), and this effect persists for at least 12 months. The available employment, platform use, and job search data suggest that employment effects are explained by work seekers using the platform to acquire information about prospective employers and perhaps by work seekers accessing referrals and conveying information to prospective employers on the platform.

Die Jobcenter in Deutschland werden entweder als \"gemeinsame Einrichtungen\" von Kommunen und der lokalen Agentur für Arbeit oder in \"Optionskommunen\" allein von den Kommunen geführt. Die Umwandlung von 41 gemeinsamen Einrichtungen in Optionskommunen im Jahr 2012 erlaubt es, den Erfolg der Vermittlungsarbeit der beiden Trägerformen zu evaluieren. Die Analyse zeigt, dass Optionskommunen gegenüber gemeinsamen Einrichtungen 10% weniger Arbeitslose in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt vermitteln. Hingegen weisen sie mehr Personen \"Ein-Euro-Jobs\" zu, die jedoch wenig geeignet sind, die Übergangschancen in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt zu erhöhen.

A growing experimental literature uses response rates to fictional requests to measure discrimination against ethnic minorities. This article argues that restricting attention to response rates can lead to faulty inferences about substantive discrimination depending on how response dummies are correlated with other response characteristics. We illustrate the relevance of this problem by means of a conjoint experiment among all German welfare offices, in which we randomly varied five traits and designed requests to allow for a substantive coding of response quality. We find that response rates are statistically indistinguishable across treatment conditions. However, putative non-Germans receive responses of significantly lower quality, potentially deterring them from applying for benefits. We also find observational evidence suggesting that discrimination is more pronounced in welfare offices run by local governments than in those embedded in the national bureaucracy. We discuss implications for the study of equality in the public sphere.