gms | German Medical Science

Background: In Germany, the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009 put the development of appropriate employment and integration policies at the forefront of a policy debate. The goal of these policies is to promote long-lasting participation in working life by providing targeted reemployment services. The Public Employment Service (PES) plays a central role in this process by offering vocational rehabilitation (VR) schemes aimed at helping people with disabilities to enter the labour market or to return to work.

Aim: This paper compares the labour market outcomes of people who were accepted into the VR programme offered by the PES with those who were rejected.

Method: The analysis focuses on a group of adult applicants in the return-to-work VR scheme in 2008. We follow the labour market outcomes of the accepted and rejected applicants for 72 months after their application. To reduce observed differences between the groups of accepted and rejected applicants, we match accepted and rejected applicants on the basis of the predicted probability to be acceted into the VR [1].

Results/findings: Acceptance in VR results in a higher probability of regular employment after the third year following application. These results are corroborated by negative effects on the number of days in receipt of unemployment and basic income support benefits.

Discussion and conclusions: Our results have some important limitations. In order to obtain more robust effects of acceptance in VR, some important improvements in the data collection are needed. Also, to explain these results in more depth, research needs to go beyond analysing the effects of acceptance in vocational rehabilitation and to study the effects of specific ALMPs offered to rehabilitants in order to identify which programmes work for whom and when.