Verfügbarkeit von Arbeitslosengeld-II-Beziehenden mit Kindern unter drei Jahren

"Unemployment benefit II recipients who are capable of working are obliged to exhaust all possibilities to end or reduce their need for assistance and to be available to the labour market. Recipients of unemployment benefit II who take care of children under the age of three are exempt from this obligation. However, they can make themselves available to the labour market on a voluntary basis if the care of the child is ensured. This research report examines the availability of non-employed unemployment benefit II recipients with children under the age of three for the labour market in 2012 and 2016 on the basis of administrative data from the ‘Sample of Integrated Welfare Benefit Biographies’. The information on availability is based on data from the job centres. There, availability is not recorded directly, but via reasons for possible unavailability. Persons for whom there is no report of unavailability are therefore not necessarily available, instead their unavailability might simply not have been recorded. The information is therefore plausibility-checked in a first step by comparing it with the registered job search status. Descriptive analyses show that mainly mothers are registered as unavailable for the labour market. This rarely applies to fathers. In the following, the determinants of the availability of mothers with children under three for the labour market are therefore examined at the individual, household and regional levels. The results show that the availability of non-employed female unemployment benefit II recipients for the labour market is co-determined by the childcare situation (i.e. the number of childcare places in the region and the number and age of the children in the household) and the labour market resources of the person (i.e. vocational training and employment experience). A comparison between the years 2012 and 2016 shows that the level of availability was similar in both years. However, the differences between eastern and western Germany were more pronounced in 2012 in that non-employed mothers of young children receiving unemployment benefit II were less likely to be available to the labour market in western Germany." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))