Author
Listed:
- Marco Caliendo
- Stefan Tübbicke
Abstract
Background: The literature on start-up subsidies (SUS) for the unemployed finds positive effects on objective outcome measures such as employment or income. However, little is known about effects on subjective well-being of participants. Knowledge about this is especially important because subsidizing the transition into self-employment may have unintended adverse effects on participants’ well-being due to its risky nature and lower social security protection, especially in the long run. Objective: We study the long-term effects of SUS on subjective outcome indicators of well-being, as measured by the participants’ satisfaction in different domains. This extends previous analyses of the current German SUS program (“Gründungszuschuss†) that focused on objective outcomes—such as employment and income—and allows us to make a more complete judgment about the overall effects of SUS at the individual level. Research design: Having access to linked administrative-survey data providing us with rich information on pretreatment characteristics, we base our analysis on the conditional independence assumption and use propensity score matching to estimate causal effects within the potential outcomes framework. We perform several sensitivity analyses to inspect the robustness of our findings. Results: We find long-term positive effects on job satisfaction but negative effects on individuals’ satisfaction with their social security situation. Supplementary findings suggest that the negative effect on satisfaction with social security may be driven by negative effects on unemployment and retirement insurance coverage. Our heterogeneity analysis reveals substantial variation in effects across gender, age groups, and skill levels. Estimates are highly robust.
Suggested Citation
Marco Caliendo & Stefan Tübbicke, 2022.
"Do Start-Up Subsidies for the Unemployed Affect Participants’ Well-Being? A Rigorous Look at (Un-)Intended Consequences of Labor Market Policies,"
Evaluation Review, , vol. 46(5), pages 517-554, October.
Handle:
RePEc:sae:evarev:v:46:y:2022:i:5:p:517-554
DOI: 10.1177/0193841X20927237
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:evarev:v:46:y:2022:i:5:p:517-554. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.