This paper advocates the cautious and constitutional evolution of existing basic income schemes (unemployment benefit IIʺ) and Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT = "Einstiegsgeld") into a means-tested combi-wage model for the future long-term unemployed (gradualism strategy). The paper argues...

This paper analyses the link between educational attainment and unemployment risk in a French-German comparison, based on a discrete time competing risks hazard rate model applied to comparable microdata sets. The unemployment risk is broken down into the risk of entering unemployment and the...

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inflow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an...

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inflow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an...

We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low...

Long-term public sector sponsored training programs often show little or negative short-run employment effects and often it is not possible to assess whether positive long-run effects exist. Based on unique administrative data, this paper estimates the long-run differential employment effects of...

Germany, as most other European countries, has been plagued by a persistently high level of long-term unemployment since the early 1980's. In contrast, long-term unemployment is much less of a problem in the United States. One potential reason for the different structure of unemployment relates...

This paper analyzes the determinants of employability differences between short-term and long-term unemployed persons. Knowing these differences could help to address active labor market policy programs more adequately to the needs of the job-seekers in order to increase employment integration....

We report empirical evidence from the first field experiments to be conducted in Germany with program and control groups between 1999 and 2002. The evaluated program called ʺTargeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT)ʺ is a time-restricted employee subsidy for means-tested welfare recipients. We focus...

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...