Die Erfolgswirkung von Gründercoaching und Gründertrainings. Eine Evaluation von Fördermaßnahmen bei Gründungen aus der Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland

This paper focuses on the question of whether improving the competence of new business founders through programs that offer external expertise enhances the duration of self-employment. In our analysis, we focus on three different programs that are provided along with a financial subsidy and that focus on founders who started a business while they were unemployed. We found that participation was strongly determined by regional patterns and time, and that individual characteristics were less important. These results reflect a particular regional specialization in promoting self-employment. A statistical matching approach was used to control for selectivity and was performed in a way that explicitly considered differences across regions and over time. The results show that the treatment effects tended to be low. However, we found evidence that external expertise increased passive learning

Labour Market Effects of the Minimum Wage Introduction in the Main Construction Sector

On January 1st, 1997, minimum wages were introduced in the German main construction sector. We examine the effects of this wage regulation on various aspects of the labour market of this sector, particularly the effects on wages and employment. In East Germany, at the time of its introduction, the minimum wage was more strongly binding than in West Germany. Furthermore, the wages of a large fraction of the construction workforce in East Germany are close to the minimum wage, which is not the case in West Germany. Our results indicate that the wage floor significantly increased wage growth but had a negligible impact on employment of domestic workers. Because of data restrictions, a causal analysis of the effects on foreign establishments and their employees or on the self-employed is not possible. We caution against drawing conclusions from the results of our study for other industries given the specific characteristics of the main construction sector in Germany