Many Western economies have reformed their welfare systems with the aim of activating welfare recipients by increasing welfare-to-work programmes and job search enforcement. We evaluate the three most important German welfare-to-work programmes implemented after a major reform in January 2005...

This paper extends the traditional focus of active labor market policy evaluation from a static comparison of participation in a program versus nonparticipation (or participation in another program) to the evaluation of the effects of program sequences, i.e. multiple participation or timing of...

This paper proposes a nonparametric method for evaluating treatment effects in the presence of both treatment endogeneity and attrition/non-response bias, using two instrumental variables. Making use of a discrete instrument for the treatment and a continuous instrument for...

Disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries lose part of their benefits if their earnings exceed certain thresholds (“cash-cliffs”). This implicit taxation is considered the prime reason for low DI outflow. We analyse a conditional cash program that incentivises work related reductions of...

We systematically investigate the effect heterogeneity of job search programmes for unemployed workers. To investigate possibly heterogeneous employment effects, we combine non-experimental causal empirical models with Lasso-type estimators. The empirical analyses are based on rich...

This paper investigates the average effects of (firm-provided) workplace health promotion measures in form of the analysis of sickness absenteeism and health circles/courses on labour market out-comes of the firms' employees. Exploiting linked employer-employee panel data that consist of rich...

Based on new, exceptionally informative and large German linked employer-employee administrative data, we investigate the question whether the omission of important control variables in matching estimation leads to biased impact estimates of typical active labour market programs for the...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...

This paper investigates active labor market programs in Austria with a special emphasis on male-female effect heterogeneity. On average, we find only small effects, if any, for most of the programs. A crucial advantage of the large and informative administrative data we use is that it provides...

We investigate the effects of the most important East German active labour market programmes on the labour market outcomes of their participants. The analysis is based on a large and informative individual database coming from administrative data sources. Using matching methods, we find that...