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Hiring workers is costly. Firms' costs reduce resources that can go to recruitment and amplify how unemployment responds to changes in productivity. Workers also incur up‐front costs. Examples include moving expenses and regulatory fees. Workers' costs lessen unemployment volatility and leave resources available for recruitment unchanged. Their influence is bounded by the properties of a matching function. Using adjusted data on job finding, I estimate a bound that ascribes limited influence. The results demonstrate that workers' costs affect outcomes (firms threaten workers with paying the fixed costs again if negotiations fail), but their influence on volatility is less than firms' costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment insurance provides temporary cash benefits to eligible unemployed workers. Benefits are sometimes extended by discretion during economic slumps. In a model that features temporary benefits and sequential job opportunities, a worker's reservation wages are studied when policymakers can make discretionary extensions to benefits. A worker's optimal labor-supply choice is characterized by a sequence of reservation wages that increases with weeks of remaining benefits. The possibility of an extension raises the entire sequence of reservation wages, meaning a worker is more selective when accepting job offers throughout their spell of unemployment. The welfare consequences of misperceiving the probability and length of an extension are investigated. Properties of the model can help policymakers interpret data on reservation wages, which may be important if extended benefits are used more often in response to economic slumps, virus pandemics, extreme heat, and natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inland waterways are vital to the Nation’s economic strength, and to the health and welfare of the American people. This paper describes an end-to-end systems analysis methodology for inland waterways that incorporates infrastructure interdependencies and cascading impacts due to loss of a key asset. The methodology leverages available Federal, State, and private-sector data, methods, tools, expertise, and existing studies to minimize duplication and ensure broad acceptance and applicability. The approach determined potential adverse scenarios and impacts upon directly affected assets (e.g., downtime of a lock, dam, or bridge), and identified industrial sites that would be affected by the loss of normal transport capability (e.g., loss of barge transport). Origin and destination information along an inland waterway was correlated with the port and dock locations of industrial sites. Practical alternative transportation modes and routes for each affected industrial site were identified, based on existing railheads and estimated alternative mode system surge capacity. Reasonable assumptions were developed and applied where specific data were unavailable, and consequences such as additional transportation costs, costs of transportation delays, jobs losses, and economic impacts on other sectors locally and regionally were determined for unique inland waterway facilities critical to the Illinois Waterway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]