Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects may differ according to ethnic origin. We apply a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job search behavioral outcomes, such as the reservation wage or...

The evaluation of labor market policies has become an important issue in many European countries. In recent years, many of them have opened their administrative databases for evaluation studies. The advantages of administrative data are straightforward: they are accurate, contain a large number...

The guide outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with ALMP's, and shows how to obtain rigorous impact estimates using two leading evaluation approaches. The most credible and straightforward evaluation method is a randomized design, in which a group of potential participants is...

In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income during job search by taking up "marginal employment" up to a threshold without any deduction from their benefits. Marginal employment can be considered as a wage subsidy as it lowers labour costs for firms owing to...

A substantial number of young unemployed participate in active labor market programs (ALMP) in Germany each year. While the aims of these programs are clear – a fast re-integration into employment or enrollment in further education – a comprehensive analysis of their effectiveness has yet to...

Many countries support business start-ups to spur economic growth and reduce unemployment with different programmes. Evaluation studies of such programmes commonly rely on the conditional independence assumption (CIA), allowing a causal interpretation of the results only if all relevant...

We assess the short-term employment effects of the introduction of a national statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015. For this purpose, we exploit variation in the regional treatment intensity, assuming that the stronger a minimum wage "bites" into the regional wage distribution, the stronger...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labor market policies. Our sample consists of 199 program estimates drawn from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007. In about one-half of these cases we have both a short-term impact estimate (for a...

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...

We estimate the long-term effects of start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants' satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program ("Gründungszuschuss") that...