Meeting and activating the newly unemployed

Exposing newly unemployed workers to intensive activation aims to enhancing individual employment through its effects on search incentives and skills. However if the incentive effect is missing, activation may reduce the job search activity of many employable individuals by locking them in a time-demanding activity. As intensive activation is usually accompanied by intensive search monitoring, it is important to disentangling the contribution of the costly activation programs from that of caseworker meetings. Using Danish data for the period 2010-13, the paper shows that requiring newly unemployed intensive activation, contrary to job search meetings, reduces employment and increases sickness benefit claims.