Using exceptionally rich linked administrative and survey information on German welfare recipients we investigate the health effects of transitions from welfare to employment and of assignments to welfare-to-work programmes. Applying semi-parametric propensity score matching estimators we find...

Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

In many countries, caseworkers in a public employment office have the dual roles ofcounselling and monitoring unemployed persons. These roles often conflict with each otherleading to important caseworker heterogeneity: Some consider providing services to theirclients and satisfying their demands...

This paper extends the traditional focus of active labor market policy evaluation from a staticcomparison of participation in a program versus nonparticipation (or participation in anotherprogram) to the evaluation of the effects of program sequences, i.e. multiple participation ortiming of such...

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assistcaseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour marketprogrammes for their unemployed clients. This statistical support system predicted the labourmarket outcome for each...

This paper examines whether contacts between caseworkers in public employment officesand employers impact on the reemployment chances of the unemployed they counsel. Thisanalysis is made possible through a large administrative dataset on unemployed combinedwith an extensive survey of...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individualearnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital.Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employedindividuals only, and employment is...

We provide new evidence on the effectiveness of West German labour market programmesby evaluating training and employment programmes that have been conducted 2000-2002after the first large reform of German labour market policy in 1998. We employ exceptionallyrich administrative data that allow...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...

There is a longstanding debate on the advantages of quasi-markets for placement services compared to their public deliverance. During 2009, the German Public Employment Service (PES) implemented a randomized field experiment to investigate if intensive services for hard-to-place unemployed...