4. Description of the data
The Hartz IV reform implemented completely new organisations to care for and to
activate the long-term unemployed and changed the eligibility criteria for long-term
unemployment benefits. We are therefore only able to compare the performance of Joint
Local Agencies with the performance of Approved Local Providers after the Hartz IV
reform, but we cannot compare the organisations before and after the reform.
Given the completely new organisations and the enlarged group of long-term
unemployed (due to the new criteria), it was not surprising that the newly created job centres
needed some time to get started. Within the first half year all job centres had filed the
applications of previous social and unemployment assistance recipients and of recent long-
term unemployed. In the first half of 2006 the workload of all job centres converged to the
new steady state level and in the second half of 2006 all job centres managed to report the
required statistics to the Federal Employment Agency.
The monthly unemployment to employment transition data used for the evaluation was
retrieved from unemployment and employment stock datasets for the period July 2006 until
May 2007. Individuals that were registered in month t as long-term unemployed without a
job and in month t+1 as employed with or without in-work benefits are counted as
transitions from unemployment into employment. In order to obtain the correct number of
transitions into employment, we had to subtract transitions of long-term unemployed into
public employment schemes and other active labour market policy instruments whose
participants are counted as employed workers in the official statistics. Unfortunately, only
the transitions for the official unemployment to employment transitions are available for
later periods, but not the data for transitions into public employment schemes and other
active labour market policy instruments.3 In order to avoid any bias resulting from missing
data for some Approved Local Providers we have restricted our sample to the first half of
2007.4
We combine the monthly transition data obtained from the Federal Employment Agency
with administrative unemployment and vacancy data on the job centre level and with the
organisation data from a survey conducted among the executive managers of job centres.
This unique dataset (IAW-SGB-II-Organisationserhebung5) includes variables that
characterise each job centre’s organisational structure, e.g. the type of case management, the
intensity and speed of activation, the counselling concept, the vacancy recruitment and the
3 http://statistik.arbeitsagentur.de/Navigation/Statistik/Statistische-Analysen/SGB-II-
Kennzahlen/Uebergangsanalysen/Zu-den-Daten-Nav.html
4 Broockmann et al. (2010) use the same time period for the identical reason.
5 For more details (in German) see: http://www.bmas.de/portal/18638/property=pdf