PRELIMINARY COMMENTS MOST WELCOME

The New Deal For Young People is the major welfare-to-work program in the UK. It is a mandatory multistage policy targeted at the 18-24 year old unemployed. This paper investi-gates the e®ectiveness of the program in terms of enhancing the (re)employment probability of participant males. I exploit the eligibility rule to identify a suitable counterfactual relying upon a simple regression discontinuity design. By exploiting such a discontinuity I am able to non parametrically identify (Hahn et al., 2001) a local average treatment e®ect (LATE). While relying upon the non parametric local linear regression method I am able to push forward such a parameter to a \global " dimension, implicitly adding parametric structure. No evidence of possible general equilibrium as well as substitution e®ects is found by a co-hort speci¯c approach (before and after the program). The main result is that the program enhances employability by about 6-7%