All developed economies have unemployment benefit programs to protect workers against major income losses during spells of unemployment. By enabling unemployed workers to meet basic consumption needs, the programs protect workers from having to sell their assets or accept jobs below their...

Die Hartz IV Reform des Arbeitsmarktes ist eine der politisch umstrittensten Reformen, die seit der Wiedervereinigung in der Bundesrepublik durchgeführt wurden. Mit ihr werden Gefährdungen des Lebensstandards bis hin zu Armut verbunden. Gleichzeitig konnte die Bundesrepublik ihre...

Recently some authors have proposed to introduce a system of individual unemployment savings accounts as an alternative to traditional public unemployment insurance. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of individual accounts as a possible alternative route to address the...

Social welfare systems usually imply specific obligations for benefit recipients. If a recipient does not comply with these obligations, a sanction involving a punitive benefits reduction may be imposed. In this paper we give an overview of the literature on the effects of sanctions in social...

The global crisis led to a smaller increase in the unemployment rate than in most other OECD countries as employment has been sustained through intensive use of reduced working time schemes. These schemes have mostly benefited workers with permanent contracts while the higher unemployment mostly...

Recently some authors have proposed to introduce a system of individual unemployment savings accounts as an alternative to traditional public unemployment insurance. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of individual accounts as a possible alternative route to address the...

Economic transition in the Czech Republic has created a group of long-term unemployed people, many of whom do not actively seek out employment opportunities and instead rely on social assistance. A number of subjective and objective factors contribute to this problem, including the shifting...

This paper uses a unique dataset about unemployment benefit recipients and their exits to employment in Estonia to investigate the effects of benefits on unemployment duration. Both nonparametric and parametric estimations show that unemployment benefits have a strong and significant...

Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this...

We estimate the effect of a shortening of unemployment benefit entitlements on unemployment duration. Previous studies on the same or related problems have not taken into account that the competing risks duration model is not identified and we shed first light on the question whether the non...