This is likely to reflect selection effects, because only 18% of the claimants assigned to job-search assistance participated in it and participants will have been a sub-group with relatively low employability. The authors however argue that the job-search assistance programme may have had a lock-in effect, similar to training programmes. Although job-search assistance programmes are often estimated to have a large positive impact, especially relative to their low cost, experimental implementations may divert scarce resources such as PES job vacancies away from the control group, resulting in overstatement of the impact.