Mandatory Caseworker Rotation and Experimental Contamination (Dossierwechsel)
Public employment agencies often enforce mandatory caseworker rotation policies after a jobseeker reaches a specific threshold of unemployment duration to introduce fresh job search perspectives. In field experiments randomized at the caseworker level, this causes long-term jobseekers to rotate between treatment and control staff, potentially contaminating experimental estimation.
Picture this
Imagine a medical trial where hospital patients are assigned a new doctor every six months. If a patient switches from a doctor participating in a new drug trial to a non-participating doctor, the patient's exposure to the experimental treatment gets interrupted, requiring researchers to track doctor-switching events closely.
What the evidence says
Caseworker switching occurred for 7.1% of stock jobseekers and 5.1% of flow jobseekers; empirical estimates of compliance and software impact remained identical with or without switchers (12% Definition 1 compliance across both samples).
- Who
- N = 22,758 stock jobseekers and N = 12,632 flow jobseekers across pilot Swiss employment offices (excluding Geneva).
- How
- Sensitivity analysis comparing full intent-to-treat sample against a time-constant non-switcher subsample (excluding 2,263 jobseekers whose caseworker status changed between treatment and control).
What to do
Define experimental treatment status using initial caseworker assignment while running sensitivity robustness checks on non-switcher cohorts to verify that administrative rotation rules do not bias impact estimates.
From the source
"In many offices, the caseworker is changed if the jobseeker stays unemployed for more than 6 or 8 months, with the intention to introduce new ideas in the job search process... In most of the analyses, we will define treatment status of the jobseeker as time-invariant according to the randomization status of the first caseworker."
Targeting_Labour_Market_Programmes_Results_from_a_Randomized_Experiment.pdf
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