Unemployment Programs in France

J-PAL Europe researchers are working with the French government to find effective strategies to get workers at risk of long-term unemployment back to work.

J-PAL researchers Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon, and Marc Gurgand, together with coauthor, Julien Guitard, have published an intermediate report on an evaluation of two pilot unemployment programs in France. The two programs were aimed at helping jobseekers that were determined to be the most at-risk of long-term unemployment return to employment. One of the pilot programs was run by the French government while the other was operated by a private company.

The intervention, carried out in multiple regions in France, was based on a program of reinforced counseling and support for individual jobseekers. In both the private version, Opérateurs Privés de Placement (OPP), and public version, Cap Vers l’Enterprise (CVE), jobseekers were counseled and monitored for up to six months. During 2007, more than 200,000 jobseekers became part of the experiment. Preliminary results show that the government operated program, CVE, significantly outperformed the privately run OPP and other existing government programs.

In regions where both the publicly and privately run programs were put in place, CVE showed increases in the return to employment over the normal, less intensive track of 8.2, 9.2, and 22.6 percentage points at the three, six, and nine month intervals observed, respectively. These results are large and statistically significant (5 percent level). The impacts of the OPP intervention were much smaller and not statistically significant.