Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35506 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 4090
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
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 (Hartz IV). Our analysis is based on a unique combination of large scale survey and administrative data that is unusually rich with respect to individual, household, agency level, and regional information. We use this richness to allow for a selection-on-observables approach when doing the econometric evaluation. We find that short-term training programmes on average increase their participants' employment perspectives and that all programmes induce further programme participation. We also show that there is considerable effect heterogeneity across different subgroups of participants that could be exploited to improve the allocation of welfare recipients to the specific programmes and thus increase overall programme effectiveness.
Subjects: 
Welfare-to-work policies
propensity score matching
programme evaluation
panel data
targeting
JEL: 
J68
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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