Improved Targeting of Social Programs: An Application to a State Job Coaching Program for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

Melayne McInnes, Orgul Ozturk, Suzanne McDermott and Joshua Mann

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In a climate of flat or shrinking budgets, can programs reallocate existing resources to improve efficiency? We illustrate the potential for gains from redirecting resources using data from a state job coaching program that is designed to increase employment among adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). We model selection into the program and employment outcomes for participants and non-participants allowing for potentially heterogeneous response among observationally equivalent individuals. In our simulations, we find that state ID population employment can be increased from 10.7 percent to an upper bound of 16.7 percent by a program administrator who can allocate the job coaches to those with the most to gain. This is a 56 percent increase in the overall employment rate. While we assume that program administrators know more about individual program participants than we do, we can consider an administrator who has only the information available to the econometrician. In this case, targeting gains based only on observable characteristics would lead to 11.8 percent employment, which is an 11 percent increase in the overall employment rate. Surprisingly, a simple rule that only requires administrators to predict employment success when treated (based on observables) will achieve almost the same results.

Keywords: Social program evaluation; Discrete-choice models; Policy simulations; Factor structure model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C50 H43 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/51392/2/MPRA_paper_51392.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Improved Targeting of Social Programs: An Application to a State Job Coaching Program for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:51392

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().