Stimare gli effetti della formazione professionale rivolta ai disoccupati - Illustrazione di un'esperienza di valutazione in Piemonte.

In the last decades, a lot of resources for active labour market policies have been devoted to training programs. Even if the opinion is diffused that training provides both an increase in skills and (thus) employability, following the international literature the impact of training on working conditions is very low. Evidence from Italy is quite scarce. In this paper an evaluation from Piedmont (in the north-west of Italy) is presented. Using administrative data from the job training and the labour market information systems, the employment rates of two groups of unemployed enrolled at Public Employment Service offices are compared. The impact estimates, obtained via propensity score matching, are (except for some quite peculiar courses) close to zero. Results are slightly better in the case of long term courses. While presenting the research, main advantages and disadvantages of different evaluation designs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]