Sheltered Employment Centres and Labour Market Integration of People with Disabilities: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation Using Spanish Data

In this paper, we apply propensity score matching in order to evaluate whether sheltered employment centres improve integration of people with disabilities into ordinary firms or not. We define as a control group those disabled workers never enrolled in these centres before the last employment spell, and we consider three ‘treatment’ groups: those occasionally involved in these centres; those working in these centres in their first employment spell, and those hired by these centres in any employment spell after the first one. Our results confirm that sheltered employment centres decrease the likelihood of being hired by ordinary firms in the last employment spell. This result is the same by regions (where regulation affecting centres may be different) but with a different size. The data comes from an administrative and retrospective dataset provided by the Spanish Social Security.