Evaluating the Effectiveness of Washington State

Abstract: This paper uses an unbalanced panel dataset to evaluate how repeated job search services and personal characteristics affect the employment rate of the prime-age female welfare recipients in the state of Washington. We propose a transition probability model to take into account issues of sample attrition, sample refreshment and duration dependence. We also generalize Honore and Kyriazidou's conditional maximum likelihood estimator to allow for the presence of individual-specific effects. A limited information test is suggested to test for selection issues in non-experimental data. The specification tests indicate that the (conditional on the set of the confounding variables considered) assumptions of no selection due to unobsevables and/or no unobserved individual-specific effects are not violated. Our findings indicate that the first job search service does have positive and significant impact. Further, we find that there are significant experience-enhancing effects. These findings suggest that providing one job search services training to individuals may have a lasting impact on raising their employment rates.

Keywords: Transition probability, Repeated job search services, Conditional independence

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Washington State Repeated Job Search Services on the Employment Rate of Prime-age Female Welfare Recipients.pdf