The study explores routes off benefits through labour market integration for young adults in Germany. Policies for young people are focused on a rapid integration into employment or training to prevent long-term benefits dependency. The causes of long-term benefits receipt can be related to poor...

The German Federal government has allowed local governments of some regions (Approved Local Providers) to be solely responsible for the care of unemployment benefit II recipients. In the remaining regions Joint Local Agencies were formed, where the local social benefit administrations work...

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...

Policy has long been based on the assumption that disabled people are either capable, or incapable, of work. This paper extends earlier analyses which show that the probability of employment is a variable, not an absolute. The disability employment penalty varies by number, type, severity and...

We analyse the effects of active social policy (ASP) on the dynamics of welfare dependence. We evaluate the impact of various ASP measures (employment and training) on the duration of welfare spells and subsequent employment spells, based on data from Denmark. The results show that employment...

It is often argued that the high level of welfare claims in Germany causes little incentive for workers with low productivity to seek for a job. We examine the influence of the ratio between estimated potential labor income and the welfare payment level on the probability of leaving social...

This paper analyses the importance of financial dis-incentives for workers in Denmark. Based on a panel survey which is merged to a number of administrative registers it is possible to calculate precise measures of the economic incentives for labour force participants between employment in a...

When the centre-left government came into power in Germany in 1998, a core promise of the new Chancellor, Schroeder, was to reduce the lack of jobs and to increase welfare. Facing persistently increasing unemployment rates from then on, the government finally launched ?Hartz IV? in 2004; the largest...

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian research and demonstration project that attempted to make work pay for long-term income assistance (IA) recipients by supplementing their earnings. The long-term goal of SSP was to get lone parents permanently off IA and into the paid labour...

In this paper, we evaluate the employment effects of Danish active labour market programmes aimed at welfare benefit recipients. We estimate an econometric model with treatment effects and discrete outcomes and we allow the responses to treatment to vary among observationally identical persons....