مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Policy makers at the local, regional and national level have started a fair number of initiatives to combat increasingly high unemployment rates of high skilled labor. In May 2012, the Council of the European Union recommended “to adopt measures (. . .) aimed at increasing the employability of graduates leaving the education and training system”.۱ A formal evaluation of such programs is, however, still lacking.

ms is, however, still lacking. This paper studies the Danish “innovation assistant” (hereafter “IA”) labor market scheme, a “targeted wage subsidy program” (Katz, 1996) for persons with a post-secondary (bachelor) or tertiary-level (master) education. The scheme served the dual purpose of getting more academics into employment and at transferring academic knowledge to SMEs since they have historically been reluctant to hire high qualified labor in Denmark and elsewhere, possibly due to information asymmetries on both sides. The IA program was launched by the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) in 2005 when the unemployment rate for high skilled workers was 3.7% and considered high given an average unemployment rate of 4.8% and the cost of educating academics.2

Our evaluation ofthe Danish IA program studies the effect ofthe subsidy on both persons and firms. We ask, (i) how do persons who participate in the program perform with regard to employment and income and (ii) how do participating firms perform in terms of employment, productivity and other success criteria. Existing studies on the effects of wage subsidies almost exclusively deal with programs geared at “the disadvantaged” (Katz, 1996), i.e., mostly low skilled workers.3 In addition, comparatively little is known about the effects of training or wage subsidy programs on the performance of the firms involved and the long-run effects on wages and employment that generally tend to appear to be more positive than the short-run impacts (Card et al., 2010), possibly since they change the recruitment patterns of hiring firms in the longer run (Katz, 1996).