Intensifying the Use of Benefit Sanctions: An Effective Tool to Shorten Welfare Receipt and Speed Up Transitions to Employment?

Bernhard Boockmann (), Stephan Thomsen and Thomas Walter

No 4580, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences are used as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of sanctions on the drop-out from welfare and the transition to employment. The estimated local average treatment effect (LATE) is an estimate of the effectiveness of an intensified use of sanctions. The results show that tightening sanction policy would be quite effective.

Keywords: welfare recipients; benefit sanctions; IV; LATE (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 I38 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2009-11
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of Labor Policy 2014, 3:21, https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-9004-3-21

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Related works:
Working Paper: Intensifying the Use of Benefit Sanctions – An Effective Tool to Shorten Welfare Receipt and Speed up Transitions to Employment? (2009)
Working Paper: Intensifying the use of benefit sanctions: an effective tool to shorten welfare receipt and speed up transitions to employment? (2009)
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