this is likely to reflect selection effects because only of the claimants assigned to jobsearch assistance participated in it and participants will have been a subgroup with relatively low employability the authors however argue that the jobsearch assistance programme may have had a lockin effect similar to training programmes although jobsearch 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