Abstract

From 2012 onwards, about 90 percent of jobcenters run jointly by the federal employment agency and the local municipality introduced the so-called counseling concept (BeKo, SGB II). Key goals of BeKo were to increase the qualification of caseworkers and standardize the counseling process, thereby inreasing counseling quality. Based on administrative data and a entropy balancing approach, this projects estimates whether the introduction of BeKo had an impact on the job-finding rate of welfare recipients.