Summary Since Germany’s social assistance reform (“Hartz-IV-Reform”) in 2005 there has been a strong increase in the number of working poor and long-term unemployed. This development is often attributed to the remaining disincentives of the reformed social assistance to take up a low-paid...

Purpose International empirical evidence suggests that immigrants have a significantly higher risk than their native counterparts of being on welfare due to their observed characteristics. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if immigrants are also more prone to take-up benefits, conditional on...

We use matched survey and administrative data to study interviewer and interview related determinants of misreporting on welfare receipt in interviews. In our data, 12.2 % of German welfare recipients underreport benefit receipt. We find that underreporting is more likely in formal and...

This paper studies whether the introduction of tuition fees at public universities in some German states had a negative effect on enrollment, i.e., on the transition of high school graduates to public universities in Germany. In contrast to recent studies, we do not find a significant effect on...

We match survey and administrative data and determine the extent of misreporting on welfare receipt. In our data, 10.5% of German welfare recipients under-report and 1% over-report benefit receipt. The analysis shows that particularly households who are close to the labour market, without...

The German Excellence Initiative was intended to strengthen university-based research and to create a set of internationally competitive elite institutions. The present article analyses whether or not designation as an elite institution has had an impact on the number of first-year students. Our...

Since 2006 school achievement of German students has been measured on a regular basis within the so-called national educational monitoring. The most recent results show considerable differences between the states. At first glance, students in the eastern and southern states perform well while...