Effectiveness of Active Labour Market Programmes on the Job Quality of Welfare Recipients in Germany

Abstract

Using rich administrative data on unemployed welfare recipients in Germany and propensity score matching, the author analyses the effects of participating in four major active labour market programmes (ALMPs) on various dimensions of job quality. In Germany, welfare recipients may suffer from poor job quality because they are forced to accept any reasonable job offer. However, few studies consider the effects of participation in ALMPs on job quality. The results imply that participation in a programme not only increases the probability of taking jobs but also increases the probability of holding a high-quality job for some dimension of job quality. In particular, further vocational training is very effective in terms of job quality for West German women. Thus, job centres should focus on the activation of unemployed welfare recipients.

Do generous unemployment benefits facilitate transition into more-secure labour market positions? Insights from a multilevel latent Markov model

“…The finding stresses that generous benefits alone might not do the job but that, in order to help people make the transition from unemployment into more-secure employment, a combination of both generous benefits and training opportunities is necessary. Comparable to recently published research (Dengler, 2019) that stresses the positive effect of trainingrelated ALMP on employment and/or work quality outcomes of benefit receiving jobseekers, our results revealed that higher levels of training-related ALMP spending generally increase the probability of moving from unemployment into temporary, standard or managerial work.…”

What gets them going? The effects of activation policies on personal change processes of unemployed youth

“…job search, participation in training and acceptance of job offers (Pohl and Walther 2007;Eichhorst, Grienberger-Zingerle, and Konle-Seidl 2008;European Commission 2018). Most modern industrialised countries nowadays comprise a range of activation programmes as part of their labour market policy (Eichhorst, Grienberger-Zingerle, and Konle-Seidl 2008;Dengler 2019). Nevertheless, little information can be found on how activation programmes are expected to reach their objectives, i.e.…”

Street-Level Judgements about Welfare Deservingness: How Jobcentre Advisors Decide about the Individual Mix of ‘Support’ and ‘Demand’ in the Delivery of Activation Policies

“…4 Some short-term programmes such as application training are primarily used to test willingness to work, while others, such as skill training (computer or language training), are of a more enabling nature. Further vocational training courses are particularly enabling and have been found to have an especially strong effect on future job quality (Dengler, 2019).…”