Volume 38, Number 4 (Fall) 2003

Laursson, Laura. 2003. "Evaluation of Swedish Youth Labor Market Programs." Journal of Human Resources 38(4):.

A nonparametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average effects of two active labor market programs for youth in Sweden: youth practice and labor market training. The results of the evaluation indicate either zero or negative effects of both programs on earnings, employment probability and the probability of entering education in the short run, whereas the long-run effects are mainly zero or slightly positive. The results also suggest furthermore that youth practice was more effective – or “less harmful” – than labor market training. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in the estimated treatment effects among the individuals.

Laura Larsson is a researcher at the Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU), Uppsala, Sweden. She is grateful to Per-Anders Edin, Denis FougPre, Bertil Holmlund, Per Johansson, Jochen Kluve, Winfried Koeniger, Michael Lechner, Gerard van den Berg, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the IZA Summer School in Munich, EALE 1999, the IWH workshop in Halle, and seminars at IFAU and the Department of Economics in Uppsala. The author takes responsibility for all remaining errors. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning April 2004 through March 2007 from Laura Larsson, IFAU, P.O. Box 513, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: laura.larsson@ifau.uu.se .