Courses or individual counselling: does job search assistance work?

How does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long-term unemployed people? We investigate whether job search assistance (JSA) helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal. To evaluate individual employment effects, we apply a quasi-experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods. We compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly. Our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the German Federal Employment Agency. When comparing participants to nonparticipants, results suggest that the individual JSA does not affect participants’ employment prospects at all and that the course JSA even decreased their employment chances. At the same time, differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants. Therefore, we compare both programmes directly to each other, that is, we use the other programme participants as a comparison group, respectively. We found some evidence that individual JSA performs better than course JSA.     

SETAR模型在中国股市波动率研究中的应用

文章对上证指数2006年1月6日-2011年5月23日收盘价的波动率进行了研究,介绍并使用随机系数SETAR模型与ARCH族模型进行对比拟合,根据数据的特点,文章构建了一种新型的SETAR模型,即AR(r)-SETAR(l,p1,p1)模型,模型利用ADF检验和AIC准则进行识别和估计。结果表明:可用AR(4)-SETAR(2,1,1)模型来拟合中国股市中的上证指数,研究其波动率特点,上证指数波动率呈不对称的响应,而且"负"响应比"正"响应高出约1.3倍。用ARCH族模型也证明了这种不对称响应的特征,但无法度量波动的强度,预测效果也没有SETAR模型精确。说明上证指数波动率不对称响应明显且呈现非线性的趋势,这种非线性的趋势更适合用SETAR模型来拟合。     

SOCIAL COMPARISON AND SUBJECTIVE WELL‐BEING: DOES THE HEALTH OF OTHERS MATTER?

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well‐being literature. So far, income and unemployment have been the main dimensions considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well‐being is influenced by inter‐personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypotheses on two measures of subjective well‐being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same condition. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people's health status serves as a benchmark to assess one's own health condition.     

MEASURING VARIATIONS IN LIFETIME WELFARE EX ANTE AND EX POST: SOME EXPLORATORY CALCULATIONS

Whereas longevity‐adjusted consumption measures have become increasingly used as indicators of lifetime standards of living, it remained unnoticed that those measures, by relying on period – rather than cohort – life tables, constitute indicators of expected – rather than actual – lifetime standards of living. In order to estimate the actual gap between ex ante and ex post measures of lifetime welfare, this paper computes, for 19th‐century European economies, longevity‐adjusted consumption measures based on period and cohort life tables. It is shown that the gap between ex ante and ex post measures is statistically significant, and that attempts to reduce it are likely to be unsuccessful, because standards of living tend to exhibit, over temporal horizons as long as a human life, structural breaks, which make the ex ante measurement of lifetime welfare highly speculative.