Abstract
The authors evaluate an active labour market programme operating in over a dozen Russian cities. The programme provides job-search assistance, financial support and social services to unemployed workers who are members of very poor families. The analysis shows that participants are significantly more likely to find and retain a job than similar workers registered with employment centres at the same time – though participants were found to take jobs paying significantly lower wages than the controls. Furthermore, data for an earlier cohort of participants show that 75 per cent of them remained employed more than a year after exiting the programme.