Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

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...

In Germany, imposition of benefit cuts for non-compliant welfare recipients depends on the policy of the local welfare agencies resulting in considerable regional variation, expressed in milder and stricter sanction regimes. Findings from international studies show, that benefit sanctions can...