Purpose -Various types of short training programmes exist in Germany. This article aims to evaluate short training courses for welfare recipients and to detect which programme type works best with respect to different outcome indicators. Design/methodology/approach -The author measures the impact of six short training programmes on the participants. She uses propensity score matching and large-scale administrative data to find suitable comparison groups. She compares treatment to non-participation as well as participation in different training types directly. Findings -The results demonstrate that in-firm training has large positive effects on individual employment prospects and stability. Furthermore, classroom skill training is more effective than other classroom types while application training is rather ineffective. Treating some of the application training participants with an alternative sub-programme would improve the effectiveness.Research limitations/implications -The results show which training types work best. However, the results do not imply macro or cost-benefit effects. Practical implications -Several of the short training courses, mostly occupation-specific subprogrammes, are short and relatively inexpensive options to activate welfare recipients. Originality/value -The paper analyses the effects of six short training programmes for welfare recipients that have not been analysed before. The sensitivity of the results is examined using a wide range of estimators and different outcomes.

In many countries, population ageing is challenging the viability of the welfare state and generating higher demands for long-term care. At the same time, increasing participation in the labour force is essential to ensuring the sustainability of the welfare state. To address the latter issue, affected countries have adopted measures to increase employment; e.g. welfare recipients in Germany are required to be available for any type of legal work. However, 7 per cent of welfare benefit recipients in Germany provide long-term care for relatives or friends, and this care-giving may interfere with their job search efforts and decrease their employment opportunities. Our paper provides evidence of the relationship between the care responsibilities and employment chances of welfare recipients in Germany. Our analyses are based on survey data obtained from the panel study ‘Labour Market and Social Security’ and on panel regression methods. The results reveal a negative relationship between intensive care-giving (ten or more hours per week) and employment for male and female welfare recipients. However, employment prospects recover when care duties end and are subsequently no longer lower for carers than for non-carers.

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In 2005, Germany implemented major welfare benefit reforms that encourage an adult worker model of the family. In this study, we hypothesised that, despite these reforms, women's assignments to activation programmes would in practice still tend to replicate the degree of labour market attachment to which they had become accustomed relative to their partner in the past. We compared programme entries between women in former male breadwinner, dual earner, no‐earner and female breadwinner households and applied event‐history analysis to large‐scale administrative data. Our findings showed that in western Germany – but not in eastern Germany – women's assignments to activation programmes indeed replicated their prior labour market attachment relative to their partner. Key Practitioner Message: • Among women receiving Unemployment Benefit II in Germany, women with partners participate in activation programmes less often; • This tendency applies especially to western German women with less employment experience and lower former earnings than their partners; • A framework should be devised to inquire about previously non‐employed women's interests in ALMP participation and offer them such opportunities.

How does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long-term unemployed people? We investigate whether job search assistance (JSA) helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal. To evaluate individual employment effects, we apply a quasi-experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods. We compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly. Our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the German Federal Employment Agency. When comparing participants to nonparticipants, results suggest that the individual JSA does not affect participants' employment prospects at all and that the course JSA even decreased their employment chances. At the same time, differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants. Therefore, we compare both programmes directly to each other, that is, we use the other programme participants as a comparison group, respectively. We found some evidence that individual JSA performs better than course JSA.