Active Labor Market” policies, where job seekers are given help to identify job o ers and
receive interview have become popular, particularly in Europe. The impact of job seeker
counseling policies on its bene ciaries may be due to a combination of an increase in the
number of job o ers or to displacement e ects. In this paper, we report on the results of a
randomized experiment designed to evaluate the impact of reinforced job market counseling
on the labor market outcomes of young, educated jobseekers in France. In order to identify
both the direct and displacement e ects, we use a two-step design. Before the experiment
start, the proportions of jobseekers to be assigned to treatment are randomly drawn for
each labor market (e.g. cities). Then, in each agency, jobseekers are assigned to treatment
randomly, according to this previously drawn proportion. The program signi cantly improves
the chance that atreated”job seeker nds a job, but there is no evidence of any crowding-out
e ects on non-treated job seekers even where the proportion of treated people is high.