Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

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available. For example, in Australia, all microeconomic evaluations or programs have
been carried out under the auspices of government departments. While some results have
been published in departmental papers, the data are not usually made available for further
analysis. Often the burden of collecting and storing the data and also collating the
documentation needed for understanding the data are deemed too great at the time of the
program, or initial interest in the program wanes, or resources simply aren’t made
available. Even if good intentions exist, the government involved often seems insecure of
making the data publicly available, or in any case don’t make it available. In this light,
the ALS although not perfect as program data, is quite rare and should be fully utilised.
The substantive analysis for this research is performed using the ALS survey data. This
survey data contains information about SYETP participants and non-participants,
however these result from ordinary variation rather than random assignment design. The
US literature has benefited from the application of experimental design for the data
collection, in the sense that the information relates to a randomly selected group of
program subjects and control group who don’t receive services. Experimental data are
held forth as the ideal data for evaluation, giving many benefits to analysis. The ‘treated’
and the ‘control’ or comparison outcomes can then be compared. 2 Experimental data can
be used to develop methods and investigate comparisons of bias from the ‘true’ outcome
for these methods.
Although this analysis of SYETP investigates the changes in outcomes resulting from the
application of various methods, because of the non-experimental data design it cannot
identify a single outcome as the true outcome. Instead it provides an exploration of
several interesting questions about SYETP and it’s effect on employment, firstly: how the
program outcome changed as a result of adjusting for various data flaws, especially
survey non-response and attrition; secondly: how the program outcome changed when the
more recently popular propensity score matching (PSM) methods were applied; thirdly:
2 It has become common in the evaluation literature to use ‘control group’ to refer to groups of program
non-participants generated by random assignment, and to use ‘comparison group’ to refer to groups of
program non-participants generated by naturally occurring variation in participation. This usage is applied
throughout this work.