Données administratives et évaluation des politiques régionales. Quels enjeux ?

Impact assessment of labour or human capital policies is usually based on direct surveys of treated individuals. The net impact should be estimated observing untreated individuals which are very similar to the treated group. However, the high cost of implementation does not allow to use large samples, and therefore it is difficult to carry out statistically significant comparison at the local level. The open access to databases which were created for different purposes (tax, administrative, monitoring) could overcome these limitations with many advantages, but the reliability of administrative sources is often overestimated. In this article we present a validation exercise based on data records provided by the Italian law whenever a change in an employment contract occurs, i.e. the so called compulsory communications (Cob). This was done by comparing two different data sources, that is the Cob database and a direct survey performed on students one year after the course.