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The German Hartz IV reform has been a far-reaching labour market reform which reduced unemployment benefit generosity. The encompassing economic evaluation tends to confirm that the reform was an initial spark for the improvement of German labour market performance. At the same time, welfare state scholars have recently expressed concerns that such reforms may have far-reaching and detrimental political effects. In this article, I contribute to this discussion and analyse the political effects of Hartz IV including decreasing satisfaction with democracy, decreasing political participation and an increase of protest voting and political polarization. To identify the effect of the reform, I rely on bi-weekly representative survey data and exploit the announcement of the Hartz reforms as natural experiment. Comparing political attitudes of persons interviewed immediately before and after the announcement in regression analyses confirms that there was a sharp drop in satisfaction with democracy and the intention to participate in the next election, as well as increasing affinity to non-established and left-wing parties. Supplementary analyses show that the effect is stronger for unemployed workers who are more directly affected by the reform. These results are robust to different model specifications and estimation techniques. Moreover, placebo tests for past and previous years refute the concern that the effect is driven by other factors such as calendar time effects. These findings indicate that the political consequences of welfare state retrenchment go far beyond electoral punishment. This is possibly more relevant today than ever before as the current increase of populist parties substantially impedes the functioning of political systems in modern democracies.

Labour market and social policies have far-reaching consequences for the lives of citizens and the society as a whole. Up to now, the evaluation of these policies has focussed on its economic effects. This dissertation aims at bringing a broader perspective to scientific policy-evaluation that considers economic as well as social, political or psychological consequences of public policies. The relevance of this argument is confirmed by the finding that labour market policies appear to have non-negligible effects along several different dimensions, which highlights that policy-goals often stand in a trade-off to each other. The main methodological innovation of this dissertation lies in the development of new research designs for the anaylsis of causal relations in social sciences.

In spite of increasing levels of female employment, having a child below school age often goes along with a substantial decrease in employment engagement for women. Consequently, previous family policy research suggests that increasing childcare availability might be a promising tool to facilitate maternal employment as it increases the economic incentive to take up work. Another line of reasoning highlights that cultural attitudes towards maternal employment are equally important in shaping the employment decisions of mothers. In this article, we combine insights of both approaches and argue that culture, in addition to its direct effect on maternal employment, moderates the impact of childcare policies. In particular, we argue that the positive effect of childcare may be weaker in more conservative cultural contexts. To assess this question empirically, we exploit the implementation of a centralised childcare reform in Poland as a natural experiment by means of a regression discontinuity design. Relying on individual-level data on employment and regional-level information on the influence of conservatism in a certain region, we run multilevel regressions with cross-level interaction terms to estimate the effect of the reform depending on the local cultural context. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, the impact of the reform is rather strong in less conservative areas but fades away in increasingly conservative contexts. Supplementary analyses reveal that the effect also differs with regard to household composition, with smaller families displaying larger gains in maternal employment. These findings confirm that conservative cultural attitudes appear to suppress the positive effect of increasing childcare availability.

AbstractPrevious evaluations of job creation schemes (JCS) reveal mostly negative employment effects, mainly due to inherent lock-in effects. In this paper, we assess the impact of an innovative JCS that employs a pre-selection mechanism to target programme participation on unemployed job seekers with very low integration chances, hereby reducing possible lock-in effects. Relying on high-quality administrative as well as survey data, we conduct regression-adjusted matching analyses to estimate the programme effect on integration into regular employment. Our results show that the programme did not succeed to foster labour market integration, but still entails remarkably negative employment effects in the first years after participation. We argue that this results from a principal-agent problem at the last step of the selection mechanism that may have led to cream-skimming rather than targeting on very hard to place workers. However, supplementary analyses reveal that negative effects can be avoided for subgroups with very poor employment chances in case of non-participation. These results are robust to the use of different matching estimators and definitions of non-participation. The inclusion of usually unobservable survey variables as well as placebo tests based on past employment outcomes refute concerns about endogenous selection. From a policy-perspective, these findings imply that targeting JCS on workers with very low integration chances is a key factor to avoid negative employment effects found in previous evaluations. At the methodological level, our analyses add to recent literature that assesses the credibility of non-experimental evaluations based on high-quality administrative data.

AbstractCross‐country migration in Europe can have multiple advantages. Among others, it can function as a buffer against economic downturns that come along with inferior employment and education opportunities, especially for young adults. However, cross‐country mobility of young adults in Europe remains low, as language barriers, the loss of social ties or cultural differences create obstacles for migration. Against this background, Germany has launched a mobility assistance programme that supports young adults from EU member states who wish to enter the dual education system in Germany. To assess the causal impact of this programme, we compare migration flows to Germany from participating and non‐participating countries in a difference‐in‐differences framework. Our results reveal a substantial programme effect that is larger for countries with above‐average youth unemployment rates. These results add to previous migration research and reveal that migration flows are indeed sensitive to policy initiatives aimed at increasing migration.

Around the globe, the coronavirus pandemic has triggered various reactions of governments designed to contain the pandemic. Among other things, the pandemic led to an unforeseen and unprecedented closure of schools and daycare facilities. In turn, these closures might have forced parents to stay at home to care for their children who could not attend schools or kindergartens. From a social policy perspective, this raises the question of the extent to which parents' employment has been affected, as time spent on childcare might make parents reduce their working hours. To answer this question, we exploit within-country variations in school and childcare policies across the federal states of Germany to analyse their effect on parents' working time. In specific, we compare the working time of parents who live in different federal states with different restrictions regarding childcare in a difference-in-differences and difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. Our results reveal a non-negligible positive effect of an earlier and more far-reaching reopening of schools and daycare facilities on parents' employment. Our results indicate that prolonged closure goes along with negative employment effects for parents. Hence, containment and closure policies to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have substantial economic and social side effects.

Objective: In this project, we study changes in the working hours of men and women with and without children in the early phase of the COVID-19 crisis in Germany until August 2020. Background: The COVID-19 outbreak in Europe led to a sharp decrease in economic activity, along with temporary closures of childcare facilities and schools. Subsequent changes in working hours in the early phase of the pandemic and during summer 2020 may have contributed to inequalities between men and women or parents and non-parents respectively. Method: We use a unique panel dataset containing monthly survey data of the Institute for Employment Research (the IAB-HOPP) combined with administrative data of the German Federal Employment Agency. We run regression models with the change in working hours (before the crisis vs. working time at each panel wave) as the dependent variable and gender, parental status, and childcare arrangement as the main independent variables. Results: We observe a comparable reduction in working hours for both men and women during the spring lockdown. However, only the working hours of women recover and return to their pre-crisis level in summer 2020. Most surprisingly, having children has an accelerating effect on recovery for mothers but not for fathers. At the end of the observation period, fathers do not recover as fully as mothers do. Conclusion: These results challenge concerns about a temporary or possibly persistent 're-traditionalisation' of gender roles during the COVID-19 crisis.

Die Modellprojekte "Bürgerarbeit" wurden zwischen 2011 und 2015 durch das Forschungskonsortium bestehend aus dem Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), dem ISG Institut für Sozialforschung und Gesellschaftspolitik und dem SOKO-Institut im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Arbeit und Soziales evaluiert. Die Ergebnisse der Evaluation zeigen, dass durch die Aktivierungsphase der Modellprojekte mehr arbeitsuchende SGB II-Leistungsbeziehende in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt integriert und aus dem SGB II-Leistungsbezug gebracht werden konnten. In der Beschäftigungsphase hingegen reduzierte sich die Wahrscheinlichkeit in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt integriert zu werden. Allerdings hat die Beschäftigungsphase zu einer Verbesserung der sozialen Integration und Interaktion beigetragen. Aufgrund der negativen Effekte der Beschäftigungsphase waren die Modellprojekte "Bürgerarbeit" nicht wirtschaftlich.

Das ESF-Bundesprogramm zur Eingliederung langzeitarbeitsloser Leistungsberechtigter nach dem SGB II auf dem allgemeinen Arbeitsmarkt ermöglicht den teilnehmenden Jobcentern, arbeitsmarktferne langzeitarbeitslose Frauen und Männer durch eine gezielte Ansprache und Beratung von Arbeitgebern, durch Arbeitnehmercoaching nach Beschäftigungsaufnahme sowie durch den Ausgleich von Minderleistungen durch Lohnkostenzuschüsse gezielt zu unterstützen. Das Programm wird zwischen 2015 und 2021 durchgeführt. In der begleitenden Evaluation sollen Erkenntnisse gewonnen werden, inwieweit das Programm - insbesondere seine innovativen Aspekte - einen Beitrag zum Abbau von Langzeitarbeitslosigkeit leistet. Der vorliegende Zwischenbericht stellt erste Ergebnisse der Evaluation vor.