Youth employment policies in France

In this paper, we present a summary of recent microeconometric results on the evaluation of the effects of active labor market policies on youth employment in France. We focus our discussion on three types of policies: (1) youth employment schemes for out-of-employment and low-skilled young adults, (2) on-the-job training schemes, (3) payroll tax subsidies for minimum wage workers. Training programs for unemployed young workers have in general no effects on post-training wages or employment probabilities, except if they have a large training content. In contrast, the reduction of labor costs have significant effects on employment probabilities of low-wage workers; however their effects appear to be stronger for workers between 25 and 30. (C), 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C33; C41; J38; J68.