Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58521 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6064
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Failure of participants to complete training programs is pervasive in existing active labor market programs both in developed and developing countries. The proportion of dropouts in prototypical programs ranges from 10 to 50 percent of all participants. From a policy perspective, it is of interest to know if dropouts benefit from the time they spend in training since these programs require considerable resources. We shed light on this issue by estimating the average employment effects of different lengths of exposure to a program by dropouts in a Korean job training program. To do this, we employ parametric and semiparametric methods to estimate effects from continuous treatments using the generalized propensity score, under the assumption that selection into different lengths of exposure is based on a rich set of observed covariates. We find that participants who drop out later there by having longer exposures exhibit higher employment probabilities one year after receiving training, and that marginal effects of additional exposure to training are initially fairly small, but increase sharply past a certain threshold of exposure. One implication of these results is that this and similar programs could benefit from providing incentives for participants to stay longer in the program.
Subjects: 
training programs
dropouts
developing countries
continuous treatments
generalized propensity score
dose-response function
JEL: 
O15
I38
C21
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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