Of carrots and sticks: the effect of workfare announcements on the job search behaviour and reservation wage of welfare recipients

Katrin Hohmeyer () and Joachim Wolff ()
Additional contact information
Katrin Hohmeyer: Institute for Employment Research
Joachim Wolff: Institute for Employment Research

Journal for Labour Market Research, 2018, vol. 52, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: Abstract The German workfare scheme ‘One-Euro-Jobs’, which provides additional jobs of public interest for welfare recipients, has a number of different goals. On the one hand, One-Euro-Jobs are intended to increase the participants’ employment prospects in the medium term. On the other hand, they can be used to test welfare recipients’ willingness to work. We use survey data from the Panel Study ‘Labour Market and Social Security’ and propensity score matching methods to study the intention-to-treat effect of receiving a One-Euro-Job announcement on job search behaviour, reservation wage and labour market performance of welfare recipients. We find that receiving a One-Euro-Job announcement increases job search activities significantly and decreases the reservation wage for women and individuals who have been employed within the last 4 years, but does not affect the short-term employment probability.

Keywords: Activation; Employment; Intention-to-treat effect; Job search; Threat effect; Attraction effect; Propensity score matching; Welfare receipt; Workfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J64 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s12651-018-0245-9 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jlabrs:v:52:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1186_s12651-018-0245-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12651

DOI: 10.1186/s12651-018-0245-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal for Labour Market Research is currently edited by Joachim Möller

More articles in Journal for Labour Market Research from Springer, Institute for Employment Research/ Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().