Presenters:   Jane Wang , Marc De Boer
Ministry of Social Development

The Job Search Service (JSS) is a new service implemented by Work & Income. It was progressively rolled out nationally from September 2006 to April 2007. The purpose of JSS is to help provide Unemployment Benefit (UB) applicants and recipients with earlier access to employment services, and enable faster exits into employment. This paper describes how time series and forecasting methods in SAS were used to evaluate the impact of the JSS on the number of UB grants, and the average duration people spent on UB and other Work and Income benefits.

An ARIMA model with intervention terms capturing the introduction of JSS was estimated using the Ministry of Social Development’s administrative data.
To triangulate our results, we introduced a dynamic regression with an ARMA error model to re-estimate the effects of the introduction of JSS. The presentation will focus on how SAS was used in this analysis, but general findings will also be presented.