@phdthesis{Mahlstedt2017,
  author    = {Mahlstedt, Robert},
  title     = {Essays on job search behavior and labor market policies},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397081},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {252},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Persistently high unemployment rates are a major threat to the social cohesion in many societies. To moderate the consequences of unemployment industrialized countries spend substantial shares of their GDP on labor market policies, while in recent years there has been a shift from passive measures, such as transfer payments, towards more activating elements which aim to promote the reintegration into the labor market. Although, there exists a wide range of evidence about the effects of traditional active labor market policies (ALMP) on participants' subsequent labor market outcomes, a deeper understanding of the impact of these programs on the job search behavior and the interplay with long-term labor market outcomes is necessary. This allows policy makers to improve the design of labor market policies and the allocation of unemployed workers into specific programs. Moreover, previous studies have shown that many traditional ALMP programs, like public employment or training schemes, do not achieve the desired results. This underlines the importance of understanding the effect mechanisms, but also the need to develop innovative programs that are more effective. This thesis extends the existing literature with respect to several dimensions. First, it analyzes the impact of job seekers' beliefs about upcoming ALMPs programs on the effectiveness of realized treatments later during the unemployment spell. This provides important insights with respect to the job search process and relates potential anticipation effects (on the job seekers behavior before entering a program) to the vast literature evaluating the impact of participating in an ALMP program on subsequent outcomes. The empirical results show that training programs are more effective if the participants expect participation ex ante, while expected treatment effects are unrelated to the actual labor market outcomes of participants. A subsequent analysis of the effect mechanisms shows that job seekers who expect to participate also receive more information by their caseworker and show a higher willingness to adjust their search behavior in association with an upcoming ALMP program. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of training programs can be improved by providing more detailed information about the possibility of a future treatment early during the unemployment spell. Second, the thesis investigates the effects of a relatively new class of programs that aim to improve the geographical mobility of unemployed workers with respect to the job search behavior, the subsequent job finding prospects and the returns to labor market mobility. To estimate the causal impact of these programs, it is exploited that local employment agencies have a degree of autonomy when deciding about the regional-specific policy mix. The findings show that the policy style of the employment agency indeed affects the job search behavior of unemployed workers. Job seekers who are assigned to agencies with higher preferences for mobility programs increase their search radius without affecting the total number of job applications. This shift of the search effort to distant regions leads to a higher probability to find a regular job and higher wages. Moreover, it is shown that participants in one of the subsidy programs who move to geographically distant region a earn significantly higher wages, end up in more stable jobs and face a higher long-run employment probability compared to non-participants. Third, the thesis offers an empirical assessment of the unconfoundedness assumption with respect to the relevance of variables that are usually unobserved in studies evaluating ALMP programs. A unique dataset that combines administrative records and survey data allows us to observe detailed information on typical covariates, as well as usually unobserved variables including personality traits, attitudes, expectations, intergenerational information, as well as indicators about social networks and labor market flexibility. The findings show that, although our set of usually unobserved variables indeed has a significant effect on the selection into ALMP programs, the overall impact when estimating treatment effects is rather small. Finally, the thesis also examines the importance of gender differences in reservation wages that allows assessing the importance of special ALMP programs targeting women. In particular, when including reservation wages in a wage decomposition exercise, the gender gap in realized wages becomes small and statistically insignificant. The strong connection between gender differences in reservation wages and realized wages raises the question how these differences in reservation wages are set in the first place. Since traditional covariates cannot sufficiently explain the gender gap in reservation wages, we perform subgroup analysis to better understand what the driving forces behind this gender gap are.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Weissenberger2017,
  author    = {Weißenberger, Martin},
  title     = {Start-up subsidies for the unemployed - New evaluation approaches and insights},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-406362},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {viii, 239},
  year      = {2017},
  abstract  = {Start-up incentives targeted at unemployed individuals have become an important tool of the Active Labor Market Policy (ALMP) to fight unemployment in many countries in recent years. In contrast to traditional ALMP instruments like training measures, wage subsidies, or job creation schemes, which are aimed at reintegrating unemployed individuals into dependent employment, start-up incentives are a fundamentally different approach to ALMP, in that they intend to encourage and help unemployed individuals to exit unemployment by entering self-employment and, thus, by creating their own jobs. In this sense, start-up incentives for unemployed individuals serve not only as employment and social policy to activate job seekers and combat unemployment but also as business policy to promote entrepreneurship. The corresponding empirical literature on this topic so far has been mainly focused on the individual labor market perspective, however. The main part of the thesis at hand examines the new start-up subsidy ("Gr{\"u}ndungszuschuss") in Germany and consists of four empirical analyses that extend the existing evidence on start-up incentives for unemployed individuals from multiple perspectives and in the following directions: First, it provides the first impact evaluation of the new start-up subsidy in Germany. The results indicate that participation in the new start-up subsidy has significant positive and persistent effects on both reintegration into the labor market as well as the income profiles of participants, in line with previous evidence on comparable German and international programs, which emphasizes the general potential of start-up incentives as part of the broader ALMP toolset. Furthermore, a new innovative sensitivity analysis of the applied propensity score matching approach integrates findings from entrepreneurship and labor market research about the key role of an individual's personality on start-up decision, business performance, as well as general labor market outcomes, into the impact evaluation of start-up incentives. The sensitivity analysis with regard to the inclusion and exclusion of usually unobserved personality variables reveals that differences in the estimated treatment effects are small in magnitude and mostly insignificant. Consequently, concerns about potential overestimation of treatment effects in previous evaluation studies of similar start-up incentives due to usually unobservable personality variables are less justified, as long as the set of observed control variables is sufficiently informative (Chapter 2). Second, the thesis expands our knowledge about the longer-term business performance and potential of subsidized businesses arising from the start-up subsidy program. In absolute terms, the analysis shows that a relatively high share of subsidized founders successfully survives in the market with their original businesses in the medium to long run. The subsidy also yields a "double dividend" to a certain extent in terms of additional job creation. Compared to "regular", i.e., non-subsidized new businesses founded by non-unemployed individuals in the same quarter, however, the economic and growth-related impulses set by participants of the subsidy program are only limited with regard to employment growth, innovation activity, or investment. Further investigations of possible reasons for these differences show that differential business growth paths of subsidized founders in the longer run seem to be mainly limited by higher restrictions to access capital and by unobserved factors, such as less growth-oriented business strategies and intentions, as well as lower (subjective) entrepreneurial persistence. Taken together, the program has only limited potential as a business and entrepreneurship policy intended to induce innovation and economic growth (Chapters 3 and 4). And third, an empirical analysis on the level of German regional labor markets yields that there is a high regional variation in subsidized start-up activity relative to overall new business formation. The positive correlation between regular start-up intensity and the share among all unemployed individuals who participate in the start-up subsidy program suggests that (nascent) unemployed founders also profit from the beneficial effects of regional entrepreneurship capital. Moreover, the analysis of potential deadweight and displacement effects from an aggregated regional perspective emphasizes that the start-up subsidy for unemployed individuals represents a market intervention into existing markets, which affects incumbents and potentially produces inefficiencies and market distortions. This macro perspective deserves more attention and research in the future (Chapter 5).},
  language  = {en}
}