New evidence on the effects of job creation schemes in Germany—a matching approach with threefold heterogeneity

This paper evaluates the effects of job creation schemes on the participating individuals in Germany. The very informative dataset at hand justifies the application of a matching estimator and allows to take account of threefold heterogeneity. The recently developed multiple treatment framework is used to evaluate the effects with respect to regional and individual heterogeneity as well as to differences in the programme sectors. The results show considerable differences with respect to these sources of heterogeneity, but the overall finding is very clear. At the end of our observation period, that is 2 years after the start of the programmes, participants in job creation schemes have a significantly lower success probability on the labour market in comparison to matched non-participants.