While a growing body of literature finds positive impacts of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) on labor market outcomes of participants, little is known about how the design of these programs shapes their effectiveness and hence how to improve policy. As experimental variation in program design is...

Start-up subsidies for the unemployed have long been an important active labor market policy strategy in Germany. The current subsidy program underwent a major reform in 2011 that changed its key parameters: support was lowered, eligibility criteria were tightened and entitlement was abandoned...

The German start-up subsidy (SUS) program for the unemployed has recently undergone a major make-over, altering its institutional setup, adding an additional layer of selection and leading to ambiguous predictions of the program's effectiveness. Using propensity score matching (PSM) as our main...