Abstract

The work opportunity scheme, which comprises a workfare scheme (One-Euro-Jobs) as the dominant form and a scheme that subsidizes regularly paid jobs, is in terms of programme inflow the most important labour market programme for welfare recipients in Germany. The programme should help to improve the employability and re-employment chances of disadvantaged unemployed welfare recipients. The project analyses the participant structure of work opportunities and of the traditional German job creation scheme. These programmes subsidize temporary employment of disadvantaged unemployed workers in the public and non-profit sector. Moreover, the project studies the impacts of participating in such programmes on the participants. The studies regard impacts on employment outcomes, earnings and welfare dependence. The analyses compare the effectiveness of the different programmes. For the workfare scheme quite detailed analyses are possible. They are concerned with heterogeneous impacts for different participant groups. As the participation may be can be implemented in different ways, we also study effect heterogeneity due to design features of participation. The different impact analyses rely on administrative micro data and apply matching methods.