Informing young unemployed people about support measures – does it work?

We conducted a survey experiment in Poland to investigate how providing young people from the NEET group with information affected their rate of registration with the public employment services. The individuals assigned to the treatment group received information about the services offered by the PES. The information was followed by three text messages (SMS) with links to the PES’ contact details and job search engines. We study the causal impact of the provision of information by comparing the rate of registration with the PES of the treated and the untreated NEETs using a post-experimental survey. The percentage of the study participants who registered at PES within the 90 days after the intervention was 17.6% for the treatment group and 19.5% for the control group. The percentage of study participants who returned to education or employment after 90 days from the intervention was 36.0% for the treatment group and 34.8% for the control group. These differences were statistically insignificant.