The goal of this paper is to evaluate a "couples-based" policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in which...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000 - 2001, a randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

Welfare reform in Australia centres on the concept of both economic and social participation. The policy concern is that people who fail to participate in economic and social life may become entrenched in disadvantage. In 2000-2001, a randomized trial was conducted by the Department of Family...

The German workfare scheme "One-Euro-Jobs", which provides additional jobs of public interest for welfare recipients, has a number of different goals. On the one hand, One-Euro-Jobs are intended to increase the participants’ employment prospects in the medium term. On the other hand, they can...

Unemployment benefits often reduce incentives to search for a job. Policymakers have responded to this behaviour by setting minimum job search requirements, by monitoring to check that unemployment benefit recipients are engaged in the appropriate level of job search activity, and by imposing...

This paper comparatively analyzes strategies of German Jobcenters to bring native and immigrant job seekers into employment. It focuses on clients who receive means-tested basic income for the unemployed, based on data from the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) from year 2015...

Most studies on benefit sanctions within the German welfare system rely on established datasets about welfare receipt. This paper analyzes how using a dataset from the operational system of the German Federal Employment Agency for processing welfare claims can contribute to further research on...

Similar to numerous other European countries, Germany's unemployment policy went through a paradigm shift in 2005, towards activation policy by tightening their monitoring and sanction regime. With our study, we aim to provide causal evidence for whether an intended positive effect of benefit...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects early job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance (UI) scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months for...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects individuals’ job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months...