According to school entry regulations in most countries, the composition of school entrance cohorts is determined by a fixed cutoff date. This procedure creates inter-cohort differences in age and development which can severely influence educational trajectories. Developmental examinations at...

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first...

This paper applies multidimensional affluence measures to a new dataset on income and wealth in 15 Eurozone countries. We start our analysis by examining the income and wealth distributions separately for each country, and extend it to a multidimensional setting by considering the joint...

A growing body of programme evaluation literature recognises immigrants as a disadvantaged group on European labour markets and investigates the employment effects of Active Labour Market Pro-grammes (ALMPs) on this subgroup. Using a meta-analysis, we condense 93 estimates from 33 empir-ical...

Deprived housing conditions have long been recognized as a source of poor health. Nevertheless, there is scant empirical evidence of a causal relationship between housing and health. The literature identifies two different pathways by which housing deprivation affects health, namely,...

We evaluate the effects of different short-term training programs on the employment chances of immigrant and native welfare recipients in Germany. In particular, we investigate whether program effects differ between both groups and what might cause these potential differences. In a first step,...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences...

Diese Arbeit untersucht die erwerbsfÄahig eingestuften Bezieher von Arbeitslosengeld II, die mindestens einmal Arbeitslosengeld II im dritten Quartal 2006 bezogen haben. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass 16% der Bezieher von Arbeitslosengeld II im dritten Quartal 2006 während des Zeitraums 2000...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

Wie lässt sich die Grundsicherung in Deutschland effizienter und gerechter ausgestalten, wenn das Arbeitslosengeld II aus politischen Gründen nicht generell gesenkt werden soll und keine zusätzlichen unteren Lohngruppen durch die Tarifpartner vereinbart werden? Das Mannheimer...