Labour Market Policy in Spain: Analysis of microdata and main results (original) (raw)

What does it take to be (counted as) unemployed? The case of Spain

Labour Economics, 2004

This paper analyzes the effects of the new European Commission regulation 1897/2000 which establishes a new definition of unemployment for the purposes of Labour Force Surveys. The paper first examines the conditions that unemployed people have to meet in order to be excluded by the new notion, i.e. being "passive job seekers", to turn then to an application to the case of Spain, a country where the new regulation was expected to have strong implications. Various characteristics of workers are related to the process of exclusion, but the most significant result is that there is a wide regional dispersion of exclusion rates, which also seems to vary significantly over time. The conclusion is that determining who are the "true" unemployed may be more difficult than the regulation hoped for.

A comprehensive microeconometric evaluation of an active labour market policy: application to the portuguese economy (first draft)

The traditional evaluation literature, where the subject of the evaluation is the participation in an exclusive treatment, does not capture the reality of the active public interventions in the European labour markets. That is the case of the Portuguese economy characterized by the heterogeneity of ongoing programmes that are available for the universe of potential unemployed participants. So, this paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the Portuguese active labour market policy in a multiple treatment context. Our approach to assess the effectiveness of the Portuguese active labour market policy, to the improvement of the employability of participants, combines propensity score matching techniques with the conventional difference-in-differences estimation to construct the relevant counterfactual under the hypothesis of selection on unobservables. The results are very heterogeneous among participants in the different active programmes in the short-run but that diversity of results tends to converge in the long-run.

The effectiveness of regional active labour market policies to fight against unemployment: an analysis for Catalonia

2009

The aim of this work is to assess the effectiveness of active labour market policies carried out by the Catalan Public Employment Services (SOC) during the year 2005. The results obtained from the application of matching techniques show that the probability of finding a job for an individual who participated in any of the analyzed SOC's actions is 5 percentage points higher in relation to those who did not participate. The individual analysis of the different programs has shown the effectiveness of the greater part of the actions carried out. Last, the results have also highlighted the further improvement of the combination of some of the actions.

Barriers to employment and welfare dynamics: Evidence from Spain

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2007

The main aim of this paper is to identify the effects of barriers to employment and other socio-economic characteristics on welfare duration taking Spain as reference. We tray to assess to what extent these personal problems might be a limit of recent strategies based on promoting work for welfare recipients. An attempt is made to answer two fundamental questions: are these barriers more relevant explaining longer spells in the programs than other characteristics? Secondly, how does the probability of exiting the programs vary as people remain for longer periods? The main determinants of durations are analysed using parametric models. The effects of unobserved heterogeneity are also estimated. The results show that employability and ethnicity are the key variables to explain the lengthening of welfare spells. Social problems add relevant qualitative elements to previous conclusions on welfare duration but the fit of the models improve by very little.

The influence of unemployment benefits on unemployment duration: evidence from Spain

Labour, 1996

This paper analyses the duration of unemployment spells and the possible incidence of unemployment insurance on job search behaviour and voluntary duration of unemployment in Spain. To do so, a longitudinal data set containing information on unemployment recipients during the period 1987-93 is used. Hazard rates and survival profiles are constructed for the cohorts of unemployed workers entering the benefit system at different points in time, and a logit model of the probability of leaving the system before exhausting entitlement period is presented. The results do not support the view that the unemployed tend to intensify their job search when benefits are near exhaustion.

An Empirical Analysis of Natural and Cyclical Unemployment at the Provincial Level in Spain

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 2018

The differences in the regional unemployment rates, as well as their formation mechanism and persistence, have given rise to a great number of papers in the last decades. This work contributes to that strand of literature from two different perspectives. In the first part of our work, we follow the methodological proposal established by Hofler and Murphy (1989) and Aysun et al. (2014). We make use of an estimation of a stochastic cost frontier to breakdown the Spanish provincial effective unemployment (NUTS-3) in two different components: first one associated with aggregate supply side factors, and the other one more related to the aggregate demand side factors. The second part of our research analyzes the existence of spatial dependence patterns among the Spanish provinces in the effective unemployment and in both above mentioned components. The decomposition performed in the first part of our research will let us know the margin that the policymakers have when they deal with unemployment reductions by means of aggregate supply and aggregate demand policies. Finally, the spatial analysis of the unemployment rates amongst the Spanish provinces can potentially have also significant implications from an economic policy viewpoint since we find that there are common formation patterns or clusters of unemployment.