The Effect of Sanctions on the Job Finding Rate: Evidence from Denmark This paper investigates the effect of sanctions of unemployment insurance benefits on the exit rate from unemployment for a sample of Danish unemployed. According to the findings are that even moderate sanctions have rather large effects. For both males and females the exit rate increases by more than 50% following impositio...

Financial institutions need to meet rising sanctions compliance demands without disrupting customer service or incurring inordinate costs. While robust filtering technology is essential to managing compliance, the most cost-effective approach combines intelligent technology, people and processes while fostering self-learning and improvement in all three components. This white paper describes th...

The existence of social norms is one of the big unsolved problems in social cognitive science. Although no other concept is invoked more frequently in the social sciences, we still know little about how social norms are formed, the forces determining their content, and the cognitive and emotional requirements that enable a species to establish and enforce social norms. In recent years, there ha...

Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of science. What I call the “null ritual” consists of three steps: (1) set up a statistical null hypothesis, but do not specify your own hypothesis nor any alternative hypothesis, (2) use the ...

Economic sanctions have the reputation of harming the population in the sanctioned countries. In this paper, I investigate under what circumstances such harm occurs and what is its magnitude. I estimate the impact of in utero exposure to sanctions episodes on infant weight, child height, and child mortality. Using a large child level data set from 69 countries, I …nd that being exposed to sanct...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of bene t reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the e ects of UI sanctions in Germany is missing. Using administrative data we investigate the e ects of sanctions on the reemployment probability in West Germany for a period before the Hartz reforms. By applying a matching appr...

In a survey of Australian citizens (valid N = 1,406), personal and social norms were found to moderate effects of deterrence on tax evasion. Personal, internalized norms of tax honesty were negatively related to tax evasion and moderated the effects of deterrence variables (i.e., sanction severity), suggesting deterrence effects only when individual ethics were weak. Perceived social norms, bey...

Benefit sanctions imposed on non-compliant welfare recipients are a new element in the German welfare system. In practice, the sanction policy and the application of sanctions vary considerably across the 439 welfare agencies. Based on combined administrative and survey data, these differences are used as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of sanctions on the drop-out from welfare an...

Recently published studies that investigate the effect of benefit cuts on the employment prospects of unemployed show that sanctions substantially increase the probability of an individual to get employed. This evidence suggests at first sight that benefit sanctions are an effective tool in the activation process of the unemployed and should be used more frequently by welfare agencies to enhanc...