Cosa si può imparare dagli esperimenti con partial compliance: il caso dell’effetto inatteso dei tirocini sull’inserimento lavorativo dei disabili psichici

We report the results of Lavoro&Psiche (L&P), a RCT which analyzes the effectiveness of intensive and personalized support - provided by professional operators named coach - on the probability of mentally disabled people to take up paid work. The result of the intention-to-treat analysis, which measures the effect of receiving the offer of service, shows a difference - not statistically significant - by 5 percentage points between the employment rate of patients assigned to the coach and that of control patients. A different interpretation analyzes L&P as an Randomized Encouragement Trial in which a particular treatment (the traineeship) is being actively promoted by the coach only to a subset of users. With this analysis, having done a traineeship increases the likelihood of obtaining an employment of 18.5 percentage points. It is possible that, for the mentally disabled, the traineeship can be an effective gateway into the labor market.