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The first of two articles, discusses the problems of seeking to introduce organizational development interventions into a major Health Service organization. In particular, the paradox is that the leaders of major change issues are themselves caught up in the instability that the interventions create in their attempts to manage major environmental and political demands. Despite the planned emphasis on regular evaluation and review, senior managers often found it impossible to be objective and impartial in relation to the data being revealed about their own “patch”. Defensive and dysfunctional competitive behaviours were unintentionally created by this formal review process. Offers suggestions about how to make these types of survey process more directly useful to managers and staff.

Describes and reviews one major initiative within the context of a ten‐year organization development strategy. Outlines the key steps involved in extending a performance management and planning process to over 600 supervisory and clinical staff. Indicates that high levels of external uncertainty and change can have a disabling effect on senior managers. This effect also has implications on the ability and scope for middle managers to play a direct and active role in the change interventions. A key lesson is the need to continually support managers to work with their own staff to help the new systems to be understood and to operate them effectively. The final section reviews the main lessons and how previous work will act as a foundation for ongoing initiatives based on principles which are consistent with the original OD strategy.

This paper analyses the effect of a particular Active Labour Market Policy, the hiring incentives, on firms hiring policies. The effects of a programme on firms' behaviour have in fact rarely been evaluated.

The analysis is based on micro-data drawn from Rilevazione su Imprese Lavoro (RIL), conducted by Inapp in 2010, 2015 and 2018 on a representative sample of limited liability and partnership firms. The authors apply a policy evaluation framework to investigate the impact of the use of incentives in the short run. The authors infer the counterfactual policy scenario thanks to a survey question that asks about firms' behaviour in the absence of the incentives. The authors also control for firms' unobserved heterogeneity, including firm's fixed effects, and endogeneity issues, estimating a differences-in-differences model that exploit the longitudinal component of the RIL survey.

The authors find that the use of at least one incentive scheme in 2017 is associated with an increase in the share of newly hired of about 0.07 percentage point in the short run. Moreover, hiring incentives have a small positive relationship with the share of both young workers and temporary contracts. Finally, these results are robust to endogeneity issues.

The analysis provides an updated evaluation of the effectiveness of hiring incentives in Italy by focusing on firms' behaviour rather than on the evolution of individual employment. It identifies the impact by using a rich set of econometric methods as well as counterfactual analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of an Italian training program on the re-employment probability of young unemployed workers. The program consists exclusively of workplace training and is coordinated by employment centers, even if it is fully implemented by firms.

The authors develop a discrete duration analysis. In particular, the authors compare the re-employment process of individuals that just finished their workplace training program with individuals that just ended their job. The authors specifically take into account the issue of self-selection adopting the propensity score matching estimation.

The results suggest that this workplace training program improves only the immediate re-employability of trained workers, failing to bestow them with durable human capital improvements. These results appear to be robust to spurious duration dependence and to self-selection. The analysis focuses on unobserved heterogeneity and, accounting for it, the authors show that the training implementation is useful to divide “good” trainees (in terms of unobserved heterogeneity) from “bad” ones.

Therefore, the authors suggest that firms are exploiting training as a screening device and that the implemented program is successful in easing the connection between workers and firms, but it fails to provide a durable improvement in skills and in re-employment prospects.

The evaluation of this program is important because it focus specifically on the workplace component of training, whereas previous analyses focused on generic training, because it evaluates a program targeting youth unemployment which is one the most urgent economic issues and because it helps in understanding the actual processes adopted by firms when implementing workplace training.

Youth unemployment is one of the major problems that the economic systems face. Given this issue, the purpose of this paper is to assess whether school-to-work transition is easier for individuals with secondary vocational education compared to general secondary education. The authors want to explore which vocational systems across Europe produce better effects.

The authors use data from a module on “Entry of young people into the labour market” from the 2009 and 2014 European Labour Survey and they estimate multinomial probit models, allowing for violation of the irrelevance of the alternative assumption.

The authors find that in countries with the dual vocational system, vocational education improves employability both in the short and medium run, whereas in countries with a school-based vocational system, results are mixed and, only in some cases, the effect of vocational studies is significantly positive.

Sample size for short-run analysis is a bit small in a few countries (Austria and Germany). Moreover, even if the authors have reason to believe that the methods adopted are mitigating the omitted heterogeneity issues and robustness checks are run on these aspects, these issues cannot be fully excluded.

The authors provide policy implications, showing that dual vocational systems can improve school-to-work transitions and that vocational structure is particularly effective in this case.

The authors provide information on which education model may offer better chance in terms of labour outcomes.

Given the relevance of youth unemployment, the authors provide valuable information on how to mitigate this problem. The use of cross-country comparisons offers great insights on which vocational systems appear to be well-suited to enhance employability.