characteristics allows us to investigate to which degree the differences in the estimates of the
overall effect are driven by differences in the organisational characteristics of the job centres.
We find that the long-term unemployed in regions where job centres use a generalised case
management approach have a higher job finding probability compared to the long-term
unemployed in regions where job centres use a specialised case management approach. In a
specialised case management approach the long-term unemployed are profiled according to
their chances on the labour market and only those with multiple obstacles to integration are
referred to special case managers. In a generalised case management approach the long-term
unemployed have fewer contact persons and all long-term unemployed are counselled
equally. Approved Local Providers predominantly use the more successful generalised case
management approach while Joint Local Agencies more often use a specialised case
management approach. In addition, Joint Local Agencies put more emphasis on fast
activation, while Approved Local Providers take more time to counsel the long-term
unemployed. Moreover, Approved Local Providers mostly have their own vacancy
recruitment service while Joint Local Agencies frequently use the vacancy recruitment
service of the local public employment service that is responsible for short-term
unemployed. In addition, Approved Local Providers more often use an integrated matching
approach, where the vacancy recruitment service generally communicates new vacancies to
case managers and does not primarily match long-term unemployed and job vacancies on its
own. Both measures that are primarily used by Approved Local Providers are positively
correlated with higher job finding rates.
The fact that Approved Local Providers predominantly implemented an organisational
structure that is positively correlated with the job finding probability of long-term
unemployed indicates that regions that self-selected into Approved Local Providers seem to
have implemented an organisational structure that is better suited to integrate long-term
unemployed into the labour market. However, the relatively poor performance of Approved
Local Providers compared to Joint Local Agencies - as suggested by the statistically
significant IV estimate of being an Approved Local Provider after controlling for
organisational characteristics - indicates that Approved Local Providers wrongly believed
that the positive effect of having a better organisational structure would over-compensate the
lost benefits of having the local public employment service and local social benefit
administration integrated.
The paper by Broockmann et al. (2010) is probably most closely related to our analysis.
They also find a positive effect of Joint Local Agencies. However, our paper differs from
Broockmann et al. (2010) in several aspects. While they rely on a propensity score matching
approach to correct for positive self-selection of regions into Approved Local Providers