What is the relationship between social welfare, safety nets and economic freedom? Arguably, if economic freedom (EF) promotes growth and if it trickles down EF promotes larger freedoms (e.g. a healthy and productive life, free from want and deprivation). However, higher EF by definition entails...

Bringing welfare recipients into jobs is a major goal of German labour market policy since a reform of the year 2005. Direct job creation providing participants with tem-porary subsidized jobs mainly in the non-profit sector plays an important role for achieving this goal. There are three...

Sequences of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) may be part of an intensified activation strategy targeting hard-to-place individuals who may be long-term unemployed and who may encounter extreme difficulty in finding jobs. Such sequences are very common among welfare recipients in Germany,...

For instrumental-variable estimation using binary instruments, we offer simple methods to obtain policy-relevant insights beyond local average treatment effects. We demonstrate the methods by evaluating an element of choice introduced into active labour market policy in Germany by a reform in...

In Germany, due to special rules 15- to 24-year-old welfare recipients, registered with Public Employment Office, are highly targeted by mandatory activation policies. This paper investigates the effects of the special rules in terms of enhancing the (re-)employment probability, increasing...

In course of the ''Hartz IV'' reform implementation in January 2005, Germany has tightened unemployment benefit sanctions. In addition, the regulations with respect to job offer acceptance have been strengthened radically. As non-compliant behavior is supposed to entail benefit sanctions, we...

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

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the nonpecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...

Relevant scientific literature has demonstrated that in spaces of smaller scale than the national, the availability of scientific knowledge is also relevant for generating spillover effects that benefit the industrial sector. The proliferation of such literature consistently stressing the...

When welfare is analysed in Sweden the analysis is usually made at the national level; when the analysis is not done on the national level, the local level is in focus to illuminate differences between municipalities. Studies on poverty are no exception. The regional level contains a lot of...