Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy Special Youth ...

40
working, looking for work and absence from the labour market. The survey data was
linked to administrative records for programme participation, and the PPM survey
outcomes. Only consenting persons could be linked, and not all linked cases had full
administrative data or PPM survey outcomes, and all incomplete records were dropped
for analysis. The matched data showed that raw outcomes for employment 3 months after
the Jobstart programme were substantially different in the matched PPM outcome and the
SEUP Labour market history, as shown in Table 2.2. The difference in the employment
outcomes measured could be partly due to the differing data sources, collection times,
response rates, recall biases, the shares of incomplete/missing data (as all incomplete
cases were dropped), and also the share of cases where there was an inability to link data.
Table 2.2 Stromback and Dockery (2000) Raw employment outcomes after Jobstart
Matched PPM
SEUP
% in Employment 38.4% 51.0%
after Jobstart
Known outcomes 318 787
Source: Stromback and Dockery (2000) p32 Table 8.3 Only includes episodes for which PPM outcomes are
known. Reported labour market activity is known for all episodes. SEUP calculated as per cent of labour
market spells, Matched PPM calculated as per cent of spells with known outcomes.
Exact matching analysis on gender, four age groups and 8 categories of unemployment
spell durations was used to estimate the net employment impact using the SEUP data. A
comparison group was constructed of those registered unemployed in the administrative
data, who were not in the programme at the point the Jobstart participants left the
programme (note this means they could have entered the programme after this point). The
employment outcomes 3 months after the programme participation reference period were
then compared. For Jobstart, the net impact on employment 3 months after the
programme in 1995 was found to be 11.8 per cent, with 19.3 per cent of Jobstart
participants in employment and 7.5 per cent of the comparison group. During the later
survey periods there was a change to the programme rules, which meant that employers
were required to retain employees at least 3 months after the subsidy period, and because
this corresponds to the post-programme evaluation period chosen for analysis these later
periods cannot be usefully considered (OECD (2001): 217).