With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

Based on new administrative data for Germany covering entrances into job creation schemes between July 2000 and May 2001, we evaluate the effects of this active labour market policy programme on the employability of the participating individuals. The programme effects are estimated considering...

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...

In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post{unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we estimate censored...

From 2002–2004, the German government passed several laws that curtailed the generosity of the unemployment compensation system. One of the most ambitious changes was a considerable reduction in unemployment benefit entitlement lengths for older unemployed, which was effective during 2006 and...

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,...

The 2005 reform of the German welfare system introduced two competing organizational models for welfare administration. In most districts, a centralized organization was established where local welfare agencies are bound to central directives. At the same time, 69 districts were allowed to opt...

In 1997, the German government enacted a reform of the unemployment insurance system which lead to a reduction of the maximum entitlement length for unemployment benefits. The paper analyses the effects of this reform on the risk of unemployment and on unemployment duration of the older...

In this paper we derive nonparametric bounds for the cumulative incidence curve within a competing risks model with partly identified interval data. As an advantage over earlier attempts our approach also gives valid results in case of dependent competing risks. We apply our framework to...