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.

中文翻译：

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失业者创业补贴会影响参与者的幸福感吗？严格审视劳动力市场政策的（非）预期后果。

背景：

关于失业者的启动补贴 (SUS) 的文献发现对客观结果指标（如就业或收入）有积极影响。然而，对参与者主观幸福感的影响知之甚少。关于这一点的知识尤其重要，因为补贴向自营职业的过渡可能会对参与者的福祉产生意想不到的不利影响，因为它具有风险性和较低的社会保障保护，特别是从长远来看。

客观的：

我们研究了 SUS 对幸福感主观结果指标的长期影响，通过参与者在不同领域的满意度来衡量。这扩展了之前对当前德国 SUS 计划（“Gründungszuschuss”）的分析，该计划侧重于客观结果——例如就业和收入——并使我们能够对 SUS 在个人层面的整体影响做出更完整的判断。

研究设计：

通过访问相关的行政调查数据，为我们提供了有关预处理特征的丰富信息，我们将我们的分析基于条件独立假设，并使用倾向得分匹配来估计潜在结果框架内的因果效应。我们进行了几项敏感性分析，以检查我们研究结果的稳健性。

结果：

我们发现对工作满意度有长期积极影响，但对个人对社会保障状况的满意度有负面影响。补充研究结果表明，对社会保障满意度的负面影响可能是由失业和退休保险覆盖面的负面影响驱动的。我们的异质性分析揭示了跨性别、年龄组和技能水平的影响存在很大差异。估计非常稳健。