We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

Im Jahr 2005 wurde im Zuge der Zusammenlegung von Arbeitslosen- und Sozialhilfe auch der so genannte 'Aussteuerungsbetrag' eingeführt, der aus Sozialbeiträgen zur Arbeitslosenversicherung finanziert wurde: Die Bundesregierung erhob von 2005 bis 2007 von der Bundesagentur für Arbeit einen...

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...

We empirically investigate how two-tier unemployment compensation schemes affect the profile of re-employment hazards. We exploit the aggravation of an existing two-tier scheme in Germany in 2005 and estimate its impact on re-employment rates at different durations. For the short-term...

Our paper investigates the relative effects of wage subsidies and further vocational training on the subsequent employment prospects of previously unemployed program participants. First, we outline a theoretical approach based on a firm's hiring decision. For the relative effectiveness of both...

We use linked longitudinal data on employers and employees to estimate how the 2003-2005 Hartz reforms affected the wages of displaced German workers after they returned to work. We also present a simple new method to decompose the wage effects into components attributable to selection on...

This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI...

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 2005, the unemployment compensation for long-term unemployed was reduced in Germany. We examine how this reform affected the transition probability to employment. Additionally, we inspect how this effect varies over unemployment duration. We estimate proportional hazard models using German...