A large and highly used number of treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe variables that affect both treatment...

Subsidizing the geographical mobility of unemployed workers may improve welfare by relaxing their financial constraints and allowing them to find jobs in more prosperous regions. We exploit regional variation in the promotion of mobility programs along administrative borders of German employment...

This paper focuses on re-examining the gender wage gap and the potential role that reservation wages play. Based on two waves of rich data from the IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey we examine the importance of gender differences in reservation wages to explain the gender gap in realized wages for a...

In many European countries, labor markets are characterized by high regional disparities in terms of unemployment rates on the one hand and low geographical mobility among the unemployed on the other hand. This is somewhat surprising and raises the question of why only minor shares of unemployed...

Labor market policy tools such as training and sanctions are commonly used to help bring workers back to work. By analogy to medical treatments, the individual exposure to these tools may have side effects. We study effects on health using individual-level population registers on labor market...

The appealing idea of geographically relocating unemployed job seekers from depressed to prosperous regions and hence reducing unemployment leads to industrialised countries offering financial support to unemployed job seekers when searching for and/or accepting jobs in distant regions. In this...

Although home-ownership has been shown to restrict geographic labor mobility and to affect job search behavior of unemployed, there is no evidence so far on how it affects their future re-employment outcomes. We use two waves of detailed German survey data of newly unemployed individuals to...

We study how the transparency of welfare systems affects labor market outcomes of unemployed workers in a large-scale field experiment. Our low-cost information intervention uses a personalized online tool that informs benefit recipients about their personal risk of a benefit reduction when not...

We study how job seekers' understanding of complex unemployment benefit rules affects their labor market performance. Combining data from a large-scale scale field experiment, detailed administrative records, and a survey of unemployed job seekers, we document three main results. First, job...

We study the interrelation between two types of risk sharing -- within the firm and on capital markets -- by analyzing the effect of wrongful-discharge laws (WDLs) on stock returns. Consistent with rational, risk-based pricing, the effect on returns is linked to how shareholders and workers...