TY  - JOUR
AU  - Barnow, Burt S
AU  - Smith, Jeffrey
TI  - Employment and Training Programs
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 21659
PY  - 2015
Y2  - October 2015
DO  - 10.3386/w21659
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21659
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21659.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Burt Barnow
George Washington University
805 21st St NW, Room 601T
Washington, DC 20052
E-Mail: barnow@gwu.edu

Jeffrey A. Smith
Department of Economics
University of Wisconsin
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1393
Tel: 608-262-3066
E-Mail: econjeff@ssc.wisc.edu
M1  - published as Burt S. Barnow, Jeffrey Smith. "Employment and Training Programs," in Robert A. Moffitt, editor, "Economics of Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, Volume 2" University of Chicago Press (2016)

M3  - presented at "Means-Tested Transfer Programs", December 5-6, 2014
AB  - This chapter considers means-tested employment and training programs in the United States. We focus in particular on large, means-tested federal programs, including the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), its successor the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), that program’s recent replacement, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), the long-running Job Corps program, and the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program. The first part of the chapter provides details on program history, organization, expenditures, eligibility rules, services, and participant characteristics. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss the applied econometric methods typically used to evaluate these programs, which in the United States means primarily social experiments and methods such as matching that rely on an assumption of “selection on observed variables.” The third part of the chapter reviews the literature evaluating these programs, highlighting both methodological and substantive lessons learned as well as open questions. The fourth part of the chapter considers what lessons the evaluation literature provides on program operation, especially how to best allocate particular services to particular participants. The final section concludes with the big picture lessons from this literature and discussion of promising directions for future research.
ER  -