Suchergebnisse

Policy evaluation, discrimination, overweight. - Politikevaluation, Diskriminierung, Übergewicht

This paper illustrates the evaluation of changes in social policy regulations with respect to two reforms that strengthened the rights of either employers or employees. Causal effects of the reform are based on control group designs (difference-in-differences estimates). The results show that interventions of the state in the labor market also have negative effects - besides the desired supportive/distributional effects for sick people in one case and for parents in the other. The regulation that the employer has to pay an absent sick worker 100 instead of 80 percent of the wage increases the average days of absence from work from about 6 to 8 days (estimates vary by specification, some estimates even exhibit higher effects), without significantly negatively affecting subjective health indicators. The regulation that demands employers to guarantee comparable employment to a parent even after 3 years of absence reduces employer-arranged training for young women.

Using three representative individual-level datasets for West Germany, we estimate the effect of the extension of maternity leave from 18 to 36 months on young women's participation in job-related training. Specifically, we employ difference-indifferences identification strategies using control groups of older women and older women together with young and older men. We find that maternity leave extension negatively affects job-related training for young women, even if they do not have children, especially when the focus is on employer-arranged training. There is tentative evidence that young women partly compensated for this reduction in employer-arranged training by increasing training on their own initiative.

Following the well-known approach by Adler and Dumas (1984) we evaluate the foreign exchange rate exposure of nations. Results based on data from 27 countries show that national foreign exchange rate exposures are significantly related to the current trade balance variables of corresponding economies.