This paper examines whether the chances of job placements improve if unemployed persons are counselled by caseworkers who belong to the same social group, defined by gender, age, edu-cation, and nationality. Based on an unusually informative dataset, which links Swiss unem-ployed to their caseworkers, we find positive employment effects of about 3 percentage points if the caseworker and his unemployed client belong to the same social group. Coincidence in a sin-gle characteristic, e.g. same gender of caseworker and unemployed, does not lead to detectable effects on employment. These results, obtained by statistical matching methods, are confirmed by several robustness checks. |
