The evaluation of employment policies: four essays.

Summary This thesis first proposes a structural evaluation of the microeconomic effects of two key policies of the Plan d'Aide au Retour à l'Emploi (PARE) implemented in France in 2001: the accompaniment and the training of job seekers. As business creation is often cited as an alternative to these policies, we then establish a model of the life cycle of self-employed workers. However, as the social cost of the measures studied is not available, a complete cost-benefit analysis could not be carried out in the framework of this work. From a methodological point of view, the structural approach is approached here as an extension of reduced form evaluations and not as their antithesis. Given the algorithmic difficulties posed by this method, we pay particular attention to the optimization techniques used and we endeavor - following Judd's recommendations - to simplify the implementation of the estimates as much as possible through the use of the AMPL software.