Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become an increasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are being supported by various governmental programs. Potential benefits include not only the end of unemployment for the new entrepreneur...

This paper provides experimental estimates of the impact of a voucher for private care within the Nordic system of universal provision of public care. The private daycare voucher acted as a significant boost for new daycare entrepreneurs to enter the market thus increasing the overall daycare...

Marginal employment', i.e. employment at low working hours and earnings not covered by social security, has been gaining importance in the German economy over the past decade. Using a large newly available panel data set and statistical matching techniques, we analyse the effects of marginal...

Public sector sponsored training was implemented at a large scale during the transition process in East Germany. Based on new administrative data, we estimate the differential effects of three different programs for East Germany during the transition process. We apply a dynamic multiple...

Support schemes for unemployed aiming for self-employment have been recently reformed several times. In 2003, the start-up subsidy" was added to the existing bridging allowance". In 2006 both instruments were merged to the Gründungszuschuss". Since the bridging allowance has been evaluated as...

Die Arbeitsmarktreformen der letzten Jahre haben die strukturellen Anpassungsprobleme des deutschen Beschäftigungsmodells zum Teil gelindert - allerdings sind noch längst nicht alle Schwierigkeiten überwunden. Für die Zukunft besteht die zentrale Herausforderung darin, eine...

Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific...

Taking advantage of a complex minimum wage structure in Honduras, this paper examines how changes in minimum wages over the 1990-2004 period affect unemployment as well as the employment and average wages of workers in different sectors of the economy: medium and large-scale firms v. small firms...

We use a new and exceptionally rich administrative data set for Germany to evaluate the employment effects of a variety of public sponsored training programs in the early 2000s. Building on the work of Sianesi (2003, 2004), we employ propensity score matching methods in a dynamic, multiple...

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become a major focus of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. If effective, this would not only reduce Germany's persistently high unemployment rate, but also increase its notoriously low self-employment rate. Empirical evidence...