We provide evidence that German public energy providers, over which municipality-level politicians hold substantial sway, systematically adjust the pricing of electric energy in response to local electoral cycles. The documented pattern is in line with both, an artificial reduction in prices...

This paper assesses the role of literacy skills as an equalizer in both educational outcomes and educational opportunities. First, by linking two surveys of adult skills for 11 OECD countries (PIAAC - Survey of Adult Skills (conducted in mid-90s) and IALS - International Adult Literacy Survey...

There is a strong debate about who should provide care to young children. Governments offer two alternative types of institutions: formal childcare and parental leave. We assess the effectiveness of these two competing institutions in promoting child development by comparing how a major parental...

This paper aims to reveal the importance of public transport policies in the evolution of crime configuration and so, the vital responsibility of urban transports and criminality in social sprawl, entrepreneurial configuration and social structure on a city. Public transport policies have an...

Previous researches have proved the existence of a causal relationship between the concentration of jobs in a city and the income of inhabitants. Other researchers have studied the close and even nearly causal relationship between those variables and the degree of accessibility or of...

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,...

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...

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...

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...