Non-profit hiring-out of labour in Rhineland-Palatinate : an econometric analysis of the reintegration success

Abstract

"This article presents selected results from the research project 'Effects on jobs of non-profit-making temporary employment businesses in Rhineland-Palatinate', which was carried out by the Centre for European Economic Research on the instructions of the IAB and the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs (IAB project 10-483 A). The primary objective of the project is to assess empirically whether unemployed individuals who have worked for a temporary employment business show a better rate of success in reintegrating into the primary labour market than unemployed individuals who have not worked for such a business. Data material from two sources forms the basis of this assessment. Firstly the eight temporary employment businesses examined were asked, both in writing and in qualitative interviews, about their characteristic features, the socio-economic background of all of their temporary wor-kers as well as about their detailed temporary employment history and subsequent destinations. Secondly the Federal Employment Services made available copies from the files on computer-assisted job placement ('coArb') which were drawn up at the employment offices concerned. On the basis of the coArb data, econometric methods (matching) are used to select a control group of unemployed individuals who have not worked for a temporary employment business. This control group is intended to be as similar as possible to the temporary worker group with regard to their socio-economic structure and labour market history. Thus it is taken into account among other things that compared with the unemployed as a whole, the temporary workers are younger, more frequently male and include a larger proportion of foreigners, resettlers of Ger-man origin and people from the former German Democratic Republic. Furthermore, in forming the control group it is taken into consideration that temporary workers have a lower than average level of education and training and show unsettled employment histories with frequent changes between spells of unemployment and employment. The econometric comparison of the reintegration success shows differences between temporary workers and the control group. In the short period (up to 5 months following the end of the time spent with the temporary employment business) the temporary workers show a reintegration result that is up to 13 percentage points better than that of the control group. For example, two months after leaving the temporary employment business 27.4 percent of the temporary workers are working in the primary labour market, whereas in the control group of people who did not take part in such a scheme the figure is only 14 percent. The result withstands statistical tests and can therefore be classified as significant. In view of the data situation, however, it is not possible to make a statement concerning the medium to long-term success. The report shows that the matching method, which is comparatively still not particularly wide-spread in the evaluation of programmes aimed at the reintegration of specific labour market groups, in association with the high quality of data, which was achieved by means of the pre-cise processing of the employment histories in the coArb, constitutes a suitable method for assessing the effects of employment and training measures." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Almus, M., Egeln, J., Lechner, M., Pfeiffer, F. & Spengler, H. (1998): Die gemeinnützige Arbeitnehmerüberlassung in Rheinland-Pfalz. Eine ökonometrische Analyse des Wiedereingliederungserfolgs. In: Mitteilungen aus der Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 558-574.