Activation programs, such as job search assistance, training, or work experience programs for unemployed workers, typically initially produce negative employment effects. These so-called "lock-in effects" occur because participants spend less time and effort on job search activities than non-participants. Lock-in effects need to be offset by sufficiently large post-participation employment or earnings for the programs to be cost-effective. They represent key indirect costs that are often more important than direct program costs. The right timing and targeting of these programs can improve their cost-effectiveness by reducing lock-in effects.

Evidence-based Policy Making in Labor Economics distills and condenses the best thinking and research on labor economic issues to enable decision makers make better informed policy decisions. Written by well-known labor economists worldwide, research findings on key policy issues are presented in a compact and readable format, as distillations of comprehensive evidence-based research with concise policy recommendations. Designed to act as a quick reference, this guide brings together summaries of over 100 articles published on IZA World of Labor to give busy policymakers and political advisors worldwide instant access to reliable and up-to-date guidance on key policy topics including: asylum and immigration policy, youth unemployment and life-long learning, innovation, and technological change.

Recent evaluations of the effectiveness of active labor market policies in bringing unemployed people back to work are not optimistic. After entering such a program, unemployed people tend to become locked-in to a temporary job so that they reduce their search for a regular job. This paper uses an administrative dataset on durations of individual unemployment spells to analyze temporary subsidized jobs. By exploiting the variation in the duration of these jobs, we investigate the importance of the locking-in effect.

This report examines the antipoverty effects of unemployment insurance benefits during the past recession and the economic recovery. The analysis highlights the impact of the additional and expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits available to unemployed workers through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA; P.L. 111-5) and the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC08) program (Title IV of P.L. 110-252). In 2011, approximately 56% of all unemployed individuals were receiving UI benefits (down from a high of 66% in 2010) and thus were directly affected by legislative changes to the UI system. UI benefits appear to have a large poverty-reducing effect among unemployed workers who receive them. Given the extended length of unemployment among jobless workers, the additional weeks of UI benefits beyond the regular program's 26-week limit appear to have had an especially important effect in poverty reduction. Estimates presented in this report are based on Congressional Research Service (CRS) analysis of 25 years of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS/ASEC), administered from 1988 to 2012. The period examined includes the three most recent economic recessions. This report contributes to recent research on the antipoverty effects of unemployment insurance in several ways. Its period of analysis allows comparisons across the three most recent recessions. The report includes estimates of the effects on the poverty rate for the unemployed, for those receiving UI, and for families that report at least one family member receiving UI. It also estimates how much of reported UI benefits went directly to decreasing family poverty levels. This report's analysis shows that UI benefits appear to reduce the prevalance of poverty significantly among the population that receives them. The UI benefits' poverty reduction effects appear to be especially important during and immediately after recessions. The analysis also finds that there was a markedly higher impact on poverty in the most recent recession than in the previous two recessionary periods. The estimated antipoverty effects of UI benefits in 2011 were about 50% higher than that of two previous peak years of unemployment—1993 and 2003. In 2011, over one quarter (26.5%) of unemployed people who received UI benefits would have been considered poor prior to taking UI benefits into account; after counting UI benefits, their poverty rate decreased by just under half, to 13.8%. UI receipt affects not only the poverty status of the person receiving the benefit, but the poverty status of all related family members, as well. In 2011, while an estimated 10.2 million people reported UI receipt during the year, an additional 15.8 million family members lived with the 10.2 million receiving the benefit. Consequently, UI receipt in 2011 affected the income status of some 26.0 million persons. In 2011, the poverty rate for persons in families who had received unemployment benefits was almost 40% less than it otherwise would have been. In 2011, UI benefits lifted an estimated 2.3 million people out of poverty, of which well over one quarter (26.8%; 620,000) were children living with a family member who received UI benefits.

This report on Latvia is the sixth country study published in a series of reports looking into how policies connect people with jobs. It focuses on Latvia's long-term unemployed and those at risk of long-term unemployment.