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...

This paper evaluates the effects of a professionally assisted consumer-directed program (Personal Budgets) compared to the standard home care programs of the German long-term care insurance. The evaluation makes use of a long-run social experiment at seven different sites with a random...

In a long-run social experiment, personal budgets have been tested as an alternative to the home care programs of the German long-term care insurance (LTCI). Due to extending the coverage beyond LTCI approved services and agencies, personal budgets may improve care outcomes compared to the...

We examine job durations of German workers using linked employeremployee data. Our results indicate that exit rates are strongly influenced by firm characteristics. The effects of some of these characteristics, however, are limited to particular job positions or skill groups. There is clear...

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...

Recent labor market reforms in Germany aim, among other things, at reducing unemployment by restricting passive unemployment measures, emphasizing local labor market policies and re-structuring public employment services. This paper uses extensive individual administrative and regional aggregate...

We estimate the effects of hiring subsidies for older workers on transitions from unemployment to employment in Germany. Using a natural experiment, our first set of estimates is based on a legal change extending the group of eligible unemployed persons. A subsequent legal change in the opposite...

Job mobility and employment durations can be explained by different theoretical approaches, such as job matching or human capital theory or dual labor market approaches. These models may, however, apply to different degrees at different durations in the employment spell. Standard empirical...

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 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...