How should the integration efforts for immigrants be organised?

How should the labour market integration for immigrants be organised in order to be successful? We compare what contract theory suggests with the empirical research on the topic. We compensate for the scarce empirical literature by looking at the larger group of hard-to-place unemployed persons as well as at employment services more generally. We find that for-profit private service providers are not more effective than public providers in this area, and are often more costly to use, even when the private provider is the incumbent. There is no clear picture regarding the relative efficiency of local versus central responsibility for integration policy.