In 2005, the unemployment compensation for long-term unemployed was reduced in Germany. We examine how this reform affected the transition probability to employment. Additionally, we inspect how this effect varies over unemployment duration. We estimate proportional hazard models using German...

In course of the ''Hartz IV'' reform implementation in January 2005, Germany has tightened unemployment benefit sanctions. In addition, the regulations with respect to job offer acceptance have been strengthened radically. As non-compliant behavior is supposed to entail benefit sanctions, we...

The German employment miracle with a weak decline in employment and low unemployment during the great recession seems to be a good example for a successful labour market reform. While the aggregate level of job turnover seems to be stable over time, there are nevertheless concerns about rising...

Start-up subsidies for the unemployed have become an important part of Active Labor Market Policy (ALMP) in many countries. Previous evaluation results show pre-dominantly (very) positive results indicating that these programs are an effective way to increase employment probabilities and income...

This paper estimates the labor market effects of being awarded with a training voucher using an instrumental variable approach. In Germany all public sponsored further training programs are allocated through vouchers and the system, we study here, thus represents a major case of the use of...

Dismissal protection has experienced many statutory changes in Germany in the past decades. This paper estimates the effects of dismissal protection on the hazard of leaving the establishment using as identification that workers employed before the legal amendment maintained their previous...

In Germany, due to special rules 15- to 24-year-old welfare recipients, registered with Public Employment Office, are highly targeted by mandatory activation policies. This paper investigates the effects of the special rules in terms of enhancing the (re-)employment probability, increasing...

Bringing welfare recipients into jobs is a major goal of German labour market policy since a reform of the year 2005. Direct job creation providing participants with tem-porary subsidized jobs mainly in the non-profit sector plays an important role for achieving this goal. There are three...

We analyse the impact of retraining for the unemployed on future labour market success, and estimate effects separately for different target occupations. We use German registry data and apply statistical matching methods. The results show that on average, after a period with strong lock-in...

A large and highly used number of treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe both variables that affect treatment...