The Afterlife of the Job: Benefits, Health, and Costs

The end of a temporary job is where its real consequences become visible. This chapter follows Stockholm Jobs after participants leave the workplace and adds two outcomes that an employment percentage alone cannot capture: health and the cost of delivering work to people near the employment margin. The purpose is to judge a temporary public job across the worker's employment and income security, the government's benefit ledger, and the employer's operational burden, without treating movement in one ledger as proof of success in all the others.

A temporary wage can stop while several pathways continue. A participant may move into an ordinary job, return to social assistance, qualify for unemployment insurance, or combine work with support. Health may improve or worsen as income, routine, stress, and social connection change. For the public employer, a worker may produce valuable services, require unusual supervision, or leave early because of performance problems. Each path starts at the same program exit but has a different meaning.

When the wage ends, outcomes split

For Stockholm Jobs, the program end is not a single transition. It is a branching point among employment, social assistance, and unemployment insurance. The study measures monthly employment as positive earnings, then follows benefit receipt and amounts. Because social assistance is locally administered and unemployment insurance is centrally financed, the same participant can move out of one system and into another while the employment outcome remains unchanged—or even deteriorates.

The regular-workplace programs show a relatively favorable combination. Youth employment participants gained 2.72 months of employment and about SEK 37,651 in earnings over months 13–36 after program start, relative to weighted controls. They received 2.6 fewer months of social assistance and 1.26 more months of UI. The paper's calculation combines these changes into roughly SEK 26,300 more income during the two years after the temporary job ended. Other municipal employment participants gained 1.76 employment months and about SEK 21,312 in earnings, while receiving six fewer months of social assistance and 7.81 more months of UI. Their calculated net income gain was about SEK 8,600.

The figures describe different groups and should not be read as a simple ranking. Youth employments targeted people aged 16–29, many of whom were at an earlier point in their work histories. Other municipal employments served older social-assistance recipients with longer and weaker labor-market histories. The estimates are average treatment effects on the treated under the study's weighting assumptions. They show that regular-workplace programs improved employment relative to their own counterfactual comparisons, not that every regular municipal placement would produce the same gain.

Stockholm hosts follows a different branch. In the two years after the program ended, participants had 1.7 fewer months of employment and about SEK 39,100 less earnings than weighted controls. They nevertheless received 5.37 fewer months of social assistance and 8.99 more months of UI. The estimated income difference was about SEK 39,300 lower. At the monthly level, the employment effect reached approximately negative 14.2 percentage points in month 26, while the UI effect was about 60 percentage points higher in months 16–19.

This pattern is not a statistical contradiction.