Impact of welfare sanctions on employment and benefit receipt: Considering top-up benefits and indirect sanctions

This comprehensive study on UB-II-sanctions in Germany, applying PSM, presents the ex-post effects of welfare sanctions on several employment states for diverse (sub-)groups of employable welfare recipients. Besides unemployed, we also regard employed, and indirectly affected household members. The monthly updated ATT show the development of the sanction effect over two years. We find sanction effects as highly volatile over time and strongly dependent on individual factors and on circumstances like the timing of the sanction. In total, we suppose tendentially positive effects on the probabilities to enter employment and to exit welfare, at least in the short run. The positive effects tend to work stronger in the short run, and the negative effects tend to work stronger in the medium and long run. Hence, the shorter the time horizons of studies on welfare sanctions are, the more the positive effects are overrated systematically. Especially the frequently occurring cases with strongly negative slopes of cumulated ATT indicate that the early positive effects, mainly driven by people with good labor market perspectives, are at the cost of people with strongly detrimental sanction effects, even in the long run.