A Caseworker Like Me – Does The Similarity Between The Unemployed and Their Caseworkers Increase Job Placements?
研究失业者与个案工作者在性别、年龄、教育、国籍上的相似性是否提升就业安置率，发现完全同属一个社会群体时就业率提高约3个百分点，但单一特征相似无显著效果。
This article examines whether the chances of job placements improve if the unemployed are counselled by caseworkers who belong to the same social group, defined by gender, age, education and nationality. Based on an unusually informative dataset, which links Swiss unemployed to their caseworkers, we find positive employment effects of about 3 percentage points if the caseworker and his unemployed client belong to the same social group. Coincidence in a single characteristic, e.g., same gender of caseworker and unemployed, does not lead to detectable effects on employment. These results, obtained by statistical matching methods, are confirmed by several robustness checks. Copyright (C) The Author(s). Journal compilation (C) Royal Economic Society 2010.