The promotion of self-employment as part of active labor market policies is considered to be one of the most important unemployment support schemes in Germany. Against this background the main part of this thesis contributes to the evaluation of start-up support schemes within ALMP. Chapter 2...

In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income by working a few hours per week. The intention is to keep unemployed job seekers attached to the labour market and to increase their job-finding probabilities. To analyze the unemployment dynamics of job seekers...

Rostam-Afschar (2014) analyzes the impact of the deregulation of the German Trade and Crafts Code of 2004 on entrepreneurial activity, using German microcensus (MC) data. He finds a positive effect on market entry and self-employment and no change in exit probabilities. As these results...

We estimate the long-term effects of start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants' satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program ("Gründungszuschuss") that...

The German start-up subsidy (SUS) program for the unemployed has recently undergone a major make-over, altering its institutional setup, adding an additional layer of selection and leading to ambiguous predictions of the program's effectiveness. Using propensity score matching (PSM) as our main...

From an active labor market policy perspective, start-up subsidies for unemployed individuals are very effective in improving long-term labor market outcomes for participants. From a business perspective, however, the assessment of these public programs is less clear since they might attract...

In many European countries, labor markets are characterized by high regional disparities in terms of unemployment rates on the one hand and low geographical mobility among the unemployed on the other hand. This is somewhat surprising and raises the question of why only minor shares of unemployed...