The Employment Effect of Intensive Support

Abstract

Intensive Support is the label for the major form of assistance provided to jobseekers by private providers under contract to the Commonwealth Government (The Job Network). This paper analyses the effect of this assistance on employment outcomes using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA). Two common approaches to estimating a treatment effect are used, matching and hazard function. Using the matching approach the focus is on the probability of employment at some fixed time after treatment. Hazard function methods, on the other hand, focus on the timing of the outflow to employment and impose greater structure on the underlying process. The results suggest that Intensive Support has no effect on employment outcomes, but the estimates are imprecise.