Does training boost the job finding rate of the unemployed ? Timing-of-events based evidence from Belgium

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the training programs offered to the unemployed in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. More precisely, we are interested in the two following questions : (a) does training increase the job finding rate of the unemployed after the completion of their training ? (b) if so, is this increase big enough to compensate the so-called lock-in effect of their training ? To answer these questions, we rely on the Abbring and van den Berg (2003) timing-of-events approach and a very large administrative dataset. We find that training has an overall strong... Mehr ...